


Ends of Overwhelm

by mjhealy



Category: Jagged Little Pill - Morissette & Ballard/Morissette/Cody
Genre: Adoption, F/M, Miscarriage, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:33:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 24
Words: 69,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24168910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mjhealy/pseuds/mjhealy
Summary: "Are you gonna tell me what’s going on?”“I uh…” She stumbles over her choice of words, no clue how to bring herself to say this out loud. “I kind of think I might be pregnant.”(or, how MJ and Steve became MJ, Steve, Nick and Frankie.)
Relationships: Mary Jane "MJ" Healy/Steve Healy
Comments: 16
Kudos: 34





	1. May 1999

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically a multi-chapter based on the version of MJ's monologue from A.R.T. in which she references having three miscarriages, and a few other little details that have been revealed about MJ and Steve's past in various interviews. (For the sake of this story, however, MJ's abortion in college never happened, since it's never actually been acknowledged in any version of the show).

It’s strange how suddenly she realizes it—later she'll wonder if God decided this was the precise moment for her life to change. She’s sitting at her desk at 11:30am, processing hours for payroll, mind essentially blank. Nothing seems to prompt her random lightbulb moment, but as she pulls a folder out of her desk drawer it hits her: she's not on her period, and she's pretty sure she's supposed to be.

She fishes in her bag for her tiny pocket agenda, the one she uses exclusively to manage her personal life. Sure enough, there it is, a tiny circle marked on the top corner of this past Tuesday, her code for herself. It’s Friday. Oh. It’s only a few days, but normally her cycles run like clockwork, and her heart is starting to pound a little faster.

She tries to tell herself to relax, but her mind is running off in a million directions. She wants to know this very instant, wants to book it to the pharmacy around the corner from the office and get home as fast as she possibly can and pee on a stick. Calm down, she tells herself firmly. If she’s pregnant, she’ll still be pregnant in five and a half hours when she’s done for the day. But that thought lasts approximately five minutes before she decides there is just no way she’s going to get anything done with this on her mind, so she gathers up her things, tells her boss she has a family situation and has to go home, and gets in the car to head to Steve’s office.

The receptionist at Steve’s firm is clearly surprised to see her, and MJ realizes she probably looks a little frantic, so she smiles warmly as the girl dials Steve’s extension.

“Mrs. Healy is here to see you,” she says into the phone, MJ trying not to laugh. Always so formal, the entry process to Steve’s office. When he comes to her office, he just waltzes right into her cubicle and no one blinks. The receptionist gives her an approving smile to signal she is free to enter and MJ heads towards his open door, HEALY marked boldly on the window.

“Hey!” He says, warm yet inquisitive. “Is everything okay?”

“Do you have meetings this afternoon?” She responds.

“Yeah… what’s up?”

“Can you get out of them?”

He looks at her, just a hint of alarm. “I guess? Are you gonna tell me what’s going on?”

“I uh…” She stumbles over her choice of words, no clue how to bring herself to say this out loud. “I kind of think I might be pregnant.”

Steve looks like he’s been smacked in the face.

“Um, holy shit.”

“I’m a few days late. So it might be nothing. But I want to make sure…”

“Oh. Ok, well, we… uh…” MJ can see he is at a loss for words. He’s dealing with this far worse than she is, she thinks to herself, a little amused. She decides to help him out.

“So what we’re going to do is go get a test, and then we’ll go home and take it, and then we’ll know for sure and we can go on with our days,” she explains. “If you want to get on cancelling those meetings.”

“Right. Alright.” It’s endearing how gobsmacked he seems by this. She’s the one who might be knocked up, and yet her brain seems to be working far better than his at the moment. She takes a seat on his couch, watching as he picks up his phone.

“Hi, Sandra. I’m going to need you to cancel everything I have for the rest of the day. Yeah. No, everything’s fine. Yes. Ok, thank you.” He places the receiver down.

MJ smiles playfully at him. “Amazing first step.”

“Be nice.”

“I am,” she giggles. Her earlier stress has somehow been replaced by a nervous excitement. If you’d asked her yesterday, she would have said she most certainly wasn’t ready for children, but now that the idea is actually on the table she can’t help but notice that she’s kind of hoping for a different answer from the test they’re about to take. Steve, meanwhile, looks distinctly paler than usual. She grabs his hand in hers as he walks towards her, running her thumb over his as he grabs his briefcase from a hook. He seems a little dazed, and she places a hand on his lower back.

“Steve, we’re going to be fine.”

“If you say so,” he replies. She feels a twinge of guilt, before reminding herself she isn’t exactly in control of this situation. Nevertheless, she and Steve had decided together they would wait a few years before having kids, and she is on the pill, so she can’t blame him either for being a little apprehensive about the prospect at hand.

They stop at the pharmacy, spending an unnecessary amount of time in the aisle staring at various tests and brands.

“Are there like… good ones and bad ones?” Steve asks, totally out of his depth.

“I don’t know,” she answers.

“I guess just buy the most expensive one.”

“Okay.”

She grabs a box off the shelf, rolling her eyes just a little at the picture of a smiling baby and walking determinedly towards the cashier. She tries not to blush as the box is scanned and placed in a bag—embarrassed a little, but also just a bit proud. Steve slides his arm around her waist, walking them out the door.

By the time they get home, MJ’s excitement has circled all the way back around to nerves again. She’s getting way ahead of herself here, already starting to imagine what the next few months could look like. Do they have space for a baby in their apartment? Has she had anything to drink this week? What’s her mom going to say? She can feel her heart beating in her stomach, giving Steve one last nervous smile as she goes into the bathroom, leaving the door open. She reads the instructions on the box three times before opening it and sitting down on the toilet. When she’s done, she leaves the test on the side of the sink, washes her hands and heads back out to Steve. He’s lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, but he sits up again when she re-enters.

“How was it?”

“Absolutely thrilling.” She sits down next to him, crossing her legs as he reaches out and places his hand on her knee, rubbing his thumb over her pants soothingly.

“Are you nervous?” He asks. She smiles.

“I mean, yeah. But also… I don’t know. Is it weird that I really want it to say yes?” She confesses.

“Not weird. But terrifying,” he answers.

“We’d be good parents.”

“You’d be a great mom,” he corrects softly. “I don’t know about me.”

“You’ll be a really great dad.”

He tries to take her word for it. He means it when he says she’ll be great—MJ was born to be a mom, and she’s had a lifetime of practice, too. Her own mother was... difficult, and as the oldest daughter, MJ was always the one her siblings turned to when things were tough at home, or they just needed a little TLC. It’s not something she talks about often, but he knows this is part of what made MJ who she now is: deeply caring for others, with no idea how to let others care for her. He has thought often about how lucky their kids would eventually be to have MJ as a mom. Apparently that might be sooner rather than later. 

This is what runs through Steve’s mind as they sit in silence, neither of them sure what to say. Steve wishes he could be as hopeful as MJ seems to be. He doesn’t know if he’ll be a natural parent like her. He already feels like he’s drowning a little bit with work, trying to advance at the firm, wanting to be able to give MJ and their future family the best life possible. He worries he’s not home enough with her, working extra hours all the time, hoping she isn’t lonely. He doesn’t know how to handle adding a kid to the mix. But maybe he’s getting ahead of himself.

Or maybe he isn’t.

They haven’t set a timer, but eventually MJ decides two minutes must have passed, and she wordlessly gets up from the bed, heading back into the bathroom. Steve wants to follow, but he doesn’t quite seem to be able to move. His body feels like lead, his heart in his stomach as MJ disappears through the open door.

A second of silence. Steve thinks he might pass out. And then MJ reappears in the door frame, her big eyes the widest he has ever seen them. She nods silently.

"You're-?"

MJ nods again, unable to form words. Her heart is thumping in her chest, but she also feels an undeniable swell of joy and excitement. Steve, meanwhile, feels like he might throw up.

"Fuck," he whispers.

MJ's words are returning to her now, her hands shaking a little as she approaches the bed. Sitting, she reaches her hand out to take his, squeezing it tightly.

"You're going to be a great dad, Steve."

He’s blinking back tears, and MJ reaches her arms around him, allowing him to fold into her. She runs her hand up and down his back, her own shock allowing her to stay calm while Steve loses it. She’s trying to feel her own body, assess if she feels any different. She does, a little, though she’s sure it was just her mind playing tricks on her. But she IS different. She’s pregnant. Everything is different. Everything is about to change.

She feels her eyes well up with tears too, leaning her face against Steve's shoulder, breathing him in as she cries quietly, shoulders shaking just a little. They sit like that for a while, crying together, processing the fact that their world has just shifted monumentally.

Maybe it isn’t exactly how they had planned it. But she's certain now that it’s what she wanted. She didn't know it until it was within reach, but she can’t shake the strange feeling that this is somehow right, that maybe she's been waiting for this without even realizing it. She’s ready.


	2. June 1999

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "More than anything, MJ wishes that she’d been paying better attention. Her doctor had promised her it probably wouldn't have made a difference, if she'd realized earlier, but still. She should have known."

More than anything, MJ wishes that she’d been paying better attention. Her doctor had promised her it probably wouldn't have made a difference, if she'd realized earlier, but still. She should have known.

She'd felt somehow off earlier in the day, at work. She and Steve had been planning to go out for dinner, but she'd called him and told him she wasn't feeling well and they had decided to stay in instead. She’d also noticed, with a hint of alarm, some blood when she went to the bathroom that day at work. It wasn’t much, and she knows that spotting is normal at this point in pregnancy, and yet for the rest of the day she’d made frequent trips to the bathroom to see if she was still bleeding. It wasn’t stopping, but she kept reassuring herself this was normal. This had to be normal.

Steve makes her dinner (just sandwiches - cooking was her domain - not that MJ is able to stomach much anyways), and they snuggle in to watch an episode of Law & Order, but she’s quickly feeling worse and worse. She hasn't had much morning sickness so far, but suddenly her stomach is really upset - which surely is normal, she tries to tell herself, but it doesn’t feel like nausea, just... wrong.

And yet, she says nothing, not wanting to worry Steve, but simply lays down on the couch, resting her head in his lap and pulling a blanket over herself. Closing her eyes, she feels his hand on her head, gently playing with her hair, his fingers brushing against her scalp. She allows his touch to calm her, trying to focus on the warm, soothing feeling of his hand instead of the dull ache in her tummy. It seems to work a little bit, and she can feel herself drifting off to sleep to the sound of the voices on TV.

Steve can tell MJ is asleep, feeling her breathing slow, resting both his hands on her. He’s really hoping she’s okay. It’s all been such smooth sailing so far, and she still seems mostly alright, but he can tell she’s feeling sicker than she’s letting on, and it worries him a little. The episode ends and another starts, and he’s really not all that interested, but he can’t bring himself to move and wake her. He reaches for the remote, clicking through channels, turning the volume down a little and listening to MJ's breathing. She shifts in her sleep, and then again, groaning slightly, and he looks down at her. She doesn’t look well, he thinks to himself nervously. She’s pale and a little sweaty, and her face looks somewhat pained. He wonders if he should move her to their bed or just let her rest here.

Before he can make a decision, she suddenly jolts awake, gasping. Sitting up, she immediately doubles over, wrapping her arms around herself tightly.

"MJ!" He says, surprised and instantly panicked. It’s immediately clear she’s in pain, and he’s deeply concerned, his mind quickly jumping to the worst.

"Ugh," she groans. This same concern does not seem to have hit her yet, too focused on the pain she’s in. "Fuck, my stomach hurts." Her voice is strained, struggling to speak through the cramping.

"Like... you need to throw up, or...?" Her face is contorted in pain, and she doesn’t answer, but he knows this is something far more serious than morning sickness. "Should we call the doctor?"

The doctor. Her brain catches up to her body, processing what she’s feeling physically, what it means. Her abdomen continues to cramp aggressively, and she suddenly realizes that this is not good. She also becomes aware of a significant wetness in her underwear - oh. This is really, really not good.

"I need to go to the bathroom," she whispers, still wincing in pain, vaguely embarrassed in addition to her increasing panic. Steve stands with her, letting her depart down the hall, hand on her stomach. He’s scared beyond belief, wanting nothing more than to follow her but sensing she wants privacy. The blanket that was covering her has fallen to the floor, and he sees it now: the couch is stained with blood.

Her heart is thumping violently in her chest as she makes her way into the bathroom, too rushed to close the door. Hands trembling, she pulls her pants down, knowing already what she’s about to see but needing it confirmed.

It’s a significant amount of blood.

She lets out a strangled sob, audible from the living room, reality hitting her at full speed. Within seconds, Steve is barrelling through the doorway, heart in his throat as he finds his wife on the verge of hyperventilating, eyes wide with horror. She can’t think rationally, not sure what to do with her hands, her clothes, whether she should re-dress herself, if she should call 911. Instead she stands, staring at Steve, neither of them moving - just looking at each other as blood drips down her legs.

And then finally Steve leaps into action, needing to do something to handle the situation. It’s pretty obvious to both of them what is happening, but they are both totally unsure of what needs to be done. He rushes back out the door, to the kitchen, grabbing the cordless phone and dialing the number for their OB/GYN that he had memorized weeks earlier. MJ is still frozen in place, trying to steady her breathing. Finally, as she hears Steve returning to the bathroom, she slides her pants all the way off, standing half naked and leaning somewhat against the wall for support. She hears Steve begin to speak into the phone, trying to focus on what he’s saying but feeling a little far away, like she can’t quite hear properly. Steve reappears in the doorway, shocked all over again by the sight before his eyes, losing his speech momentarily. He swallows.

"She wants to know how bad the pain is, like, scale of 1-10," he breathes, mouth dry. MJ grimaces, bent over slightly at the hips.

"Um, 6 or 7, I don't know." She’s struggling to stay present mentally as Steve repeats this into the phone.

"6 or 7, she says, yeah." MJ watches him nod, listening.

"A lot, it seems, to me," he answers to a question she hadn't heard, looking down at her legs. Oh. Blood. A lot of blood. Yeah. MJ can feel her face getting red, not knowing why she’s so embarrassed. More nodding.

"Do you feel like you're gonna pass out?" He asks her. She takes stock of her body for a second. She feels scared, shaky, pained, but no, not lightheaded. She shakes her head, not speaking out loud.

"No, she's not going to pass out. Okay. Okay." She wishes she could hear the voice on the other end, because she no idea what it’s saying to Steve, but it certainly doesn’t seem good. Steve keeps repeating "okay," clearly being given some kind of instruction. Well, at least now they’ll know what to do.

And then she realizes Steve is trying not to cry.

"Okay. Thank you," he says quietly, hanging up. He blinks, clearly trying to stay in control of his emotions, knowing she needs him to stay strong. Steve looks at her, trying to pick the exact right words for what he is about to say.

"She said that, um. There's nothing we can really do at this point. So we should just... make you comfortable." Steve is trying very, very hard not to cry, desperately wanting to stay strong for MJ. "If you start feeling faint or the pain gets too bad, we can call 911, but other than that we should just go in tomorrow to get you checked out. But... she just. She said she's sorry."

Sorry. MJ suddenly knows what it’s like to feel your heart break. Involuntarily, she lets out another small sob, and slides down to the cold bathroom floor, pulling her knees up to her chest. Nothing they can do. She gasps in pain, her stomach cramping violently, rudely reminding her of the severity of the situation.

It’s over.

She begins to cry in earnest, and Steve approaches her, taking a seat next to her on the floor, going to pull her in to his chest. She leans against him, crying into his shirt. What is she supposed to do now? Just sit here on the bathroom floor, bleeding? She lifts her face off his chest again, speaking through tears.

"Did she say... how long I'm going to... how long this will take?"

"Oh, uh…" He is trying to remember all that was said, but he doesn’t think he has an answer. "No, she didn’t say."

God. Suddenly she does feel a little like she might faint, but surely it’s just the stress. How long is she supposed to sit here for? Her stomach cramps again, and she groans.

"Oh sweetheart..." He places a hand on the back of her head again, like he had earlier, less than an hour ago when everything was still fine. He gently strokes the back of her neck, playing with her hair. He has no idea what to do, how to make her feel better, though he figures that’s almost certainly not possible. He himself feels like he’s about to sob at any moment.

It suddenly occurs to him that the bathroom floor is probably not the most comfortable place for her right now.

"I'm going to get you some clean clothes," he whispers, "and we can get you into bed."

"I'm bleeding," she replies, a little bit confused and not quite thinking clearly.

"I'll bring you a pad," he explains. Oh, obviously, duh. She looks up at the ceiling, fresh tears springing to her eyes. Fuck. She doesn’t think the reality of what is happening has actually set in yet. She’s so confused, so shocked... she'd barely just been adjusting to the thought that she was pregnant, that she and Steve were going to be parents. Now they weren't.

Steve returns, a t-shirt, sweatpants, and underwear in hand. MJ changes, and he places his hands on her shoulders, gently guiding her towards the bedroom. She’s starting to feel overwhelmed by his presence, his concern, his sadness. She needs a moment to herself.

"Can you get me some tylenol?" She asks quietly. He nods, taking off surprisingly quickly, returning soon with a glass of water, some drugs, and a hot water bottle. Oh. So thoughtful. But he seems to be preparing to get into bed with her, and she doesn’t really think she wants another body so close to her. She needs some space. And she has another thought on her mind.

"Can you go... clean up?" She whispers. She hates the idea of that mess on their floor, imagining herself needing to use the bathroom later and being met with a puddle of blood. Her mind is probably exaggerating how bad it was, but she can’t shake the image of their bathroom looking like a crime scene and the thought makes her sick. Steve nods once again, leaving as she takes the hot water bottle and places it on her stomach.

The second he’s out the door a wave of guilt washes over her, and she can’t believe she has just sent him off to clean up after her, the mess she'd made... all that remained of what had once been their baby. Fuck. It really happened. It’s really over. She lost the baby.

MJ starts to sob aggressively. She had lost the baby, it’s over, everything is over, the joy and excitement is over. She can’t control this flood of emotion, heaving and crying louder and louder. She can’t believe it could all end so fast, just like that, with so little warning.

She hears footsteps in the doorway. He’s back. With great effort, she forces herself to calm down, silencing her tears. And then, in the silence, she hears him. He’s crying too, approaching the bed. God, she’s being so selfish. This had been his baby too. His baby that she hadn't been able to carry, that she had lost. Sure, he had been terrified at first, but he had become so excited...

She feels Steve climb into bed with her, sliding under the covers, curling up behind her and matching her shape. He places his arm over her side, wrapping her up and kissing her softly on the back of her head. Neither of them make much noise, but both can tell the other is crying. There is nothing to say.

"I'm sorry," she whispers.

"Yeah, me too."

She breathes deeply, focusing on the warmth he was radiating onto her back, how her body folded into his perfectly, and how his arm made her feel protected and safe. She had failed him, she knows. She had failed both of them. But she’s going to get this right. She's going to make it right.


	3. June to October 1999

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MJ wants to try again. Steve isn't so sure.

MJ and Steve's saving grace is the fact that they hadn't told a soul that she had been pregnant.

Especially since she had come dangerously close. In the days leading up to her... losing the baby (the other word tastes too weird in her mouth), she had felt this strange, burning desire to call her mother and tell her the good news. Speaking to her mother was normally something MJ tried to avoid as much as possible, as most conversations with her were tense and always left MJ rather upset. She read too much into her mother's tone, maybe, but she could always hear the ever-present hint of disapproval in her voice as MJ told her what was going on in her life.

But there was no way she could be disappointed about this, right? MJ was doing exactly the kinds of things her mother respected most in life: she'd married a nice, educated boy who could provide for them financially, and she was going to have a baby. She had, on multiple occasions, imagined it vividly in her head. Dialing her family's number, telling her mom that she was going to become a grandmother, hearing the swell of pride and excitement in her voice. Maybe she'd even finally be willing to take the trip down to Chicago and see MJ and Steve's place, the soon-to-be Healy family home. She'd never been before, which MJ tried not to think about too much so as not to get her feelings too hurt. There were a lot of things about her mother that MJ had to avoid thinking about so as to not hurt her own feelings. Things she couldn’t wait to do right with her own children.

Well, anyways. She hadn't yet gotten around to telling her. Thank goodness. Because then it was all over before it even began, and she wouldn't have been able to handle telling her mother THAT.

MJ doesn’t know how to understand what she’s feeling. In truth, she doesn’t feel as devastated as she had thought she would. Steve is so, so sad. She had always known he was a sensitive guy - it was such a big part of why she fell in love with him - but she had never seen him experience this level of pain. He had cried so much, over so many days, usually in private, but she knew. MJ, meanwhile, hasn’t cried at all since the night it happened. She wishes, honestly, that she were as sad about it as Steve was. That’s the natural reaction, right? She just feels confused. And numb.

And also very, very guilty. That’s what emerges, amidst the numbness, a nagging guilt that settles somewhere deep in her stomach and doesn’t leave. Steve is so fucking sad. And she knows he'd never admit it, and somewhere in her logical mind she knows she had no control over the situation, but she still can’t help but think this is her fault. Isn’t it?

She tries to tell herself it isn’t. Just like she had in the past, she tries to convince herself that this is God's will. He has a plan for her, surely. And yet that nagging self-blame still burns within her, somewhere so deep that logic can’t touch it, can’t silence it.

\---

Her phone is ringing, and she realizes it’s probably her mother. It’s a Sunday night, and her mom often calls around this time for some reason. She considers letting it ring, feeling a little fragile, but her guilt wins out and she picks up.

“Hello?”

“Hi, darling,” she hears her mother’s voice say. “How are you?”

For the briefest of moments, she considers telling her mom what happened, a small fantasy in which her mother would comfort her playing out in her head. But she’s not really in the mood to talk about it or think about it, so instead she says “I’m good, how are you?”

Thus launches a monologue about life back home, an endless stream of complaints that leaves MJ with no room to get a word in. Her mom puts special emphasis on Uncle John being back in the hospital with no one to take care of him, as there just isn’t enough family to give him the time he needs—this is a dig at her, she knows, for not being home, and she rolls her eyes.

“Do you think maybe you’d have time to come home for the 4th of July?” Her mother asks, and MJ almost tries to take the question seriously and not read too much into it, before she continues: “We miss you so much, you know. Maggie was heartbroken that you weren’t there for her graduation, she cried herself to sleep the night before.”

Anger rises in her chest. She felt terrible enough about not being there for her sister’s high school graduation, but she hadn’t been able to get the time off work, which her mother knows, and yet here she is trying to use it against her. MJ is sure her mother didn’t give Maggie the time of day when she was upset—she probably told her to get over it—but now it works for her eternal cause of trying to make MJ feel like some kind of traitor to the family for daring to move to a different state and start her own life.

“Maybe,” she says in answer to the question. “I don’t know. Mom, I have to go, I have dinner on the stove,” she lies.

“Okay, but let’s chat again soon, okay? I miss you.”  
“Miss you too.” She hangs up immediately.

She was right, she shouldn’t have answered. She’s not in the right headspace to be reminded of other people she has failed, other people who’ve been hurt by her recently. She decides in this second that she needs to do something. She can fix this. She’s going to make it up to Steve, give him what he so clearly wants, start their family. Not that she doesn’t want it too. She does, deeply and fundamentally in a way she had never expected to.

\--

Six weeks after the night it all ended, MJ goes to the bathroom and sees blood. For a brief moment she feels the air leave her lungs, her heart rate speeding up as panic flows through her, remembering the last time. Then her sanity returns as quickly as it had gone: it’s just her period, her first one in months. A moment to process the implications. Her period means normalcy, everything working as it should once again. She could, if she wanted, become pregnant now.

"I think we should try again," she tells Steve later that same day. He is not nearly as confident as her, still reeling from the devastation of the first time.

"Are you sure you're... ready?" He asks, his eyes questioning her. He has been a little concerned with her seeming indifference to the situation, sure that she was hiding her feelings from him. She figures that that’s what he’s thinking, but she doesn’t know how to tell him she isn’t hiding anything, she just... isn’t feeling.

She tries to show her absolute certainty, nodding strongly. "Completely. I really, really want this." She smiles slightly.

Steve isn’t so sure, but then again, she’s the one who'd gone through the pain, the physical trauma of loss. It’s her body. Surely he has no right to let his feelings override hers. So he smiles back.

"Alright, let's do it."

And so July marks the start of their first intended attempts to conceive. Suddenly their lives are full of ovulation tests, of stupid old wives' tales that they definitely do not believe and yet find themselves practicing, of MJ paying close attention to every single sensation in her body. She also starts taking far more pregnancy tests than she should. She has become, in truth, completely obsessed. She takes them mostly in secret, knowing she is going overboard and yet constantly convincing herself that each one would be the one that turned out positive.

She’s growing impatient, too, even though she knows it had not been long enough to merit frustration. But if she could get pregnant by accident, surely she could do it on purpose. Over and over again, she takes tests in secret, and then wraps the always negative stick in a plastic bag to dispose of it in the garbage bin out front. An endless loop. She leans on the knowledge that any day could be the day the loop changes.

\--

MJ wakes up at 6:30am, one morning in the middle of October, half an hour before her alarm, stomach churning aggressively. It’s an overpowering nausea, and she attempts to lie as still as possible, eyes closed, hoping to get it to pass. It only grows worse, and she can feel her stomach rising into her throat. Quickly, she climbs out of bed, stumbling into the bathroom and falling to her knees in front of the toilet. The thought occurs to her through the fog in her brain - morning sickness? She’s distracted by her stomach flipping over, trying her best to tuck her hair behind her ears as she lurches forward and retches.

She hears Steve come up behind her, having been awoken by her sudden rush out of bed and the sound of her being sick. He kneels beside her, scooping her hair up and rubbing her back as she vomits again.

"That's it, you're okay," he whispers, his hand never leaving her back. She heaves again, involuntary tears streaming down her face, before finally flushing and sitting back onto her heels, her stomach feeling more settled.

"Feel a bit better?" He asks, standing up and filling a cup with water for her. She nods.

"Yeah. Not fun."

"I bet. Think you caught a bug?" He hands her the glass, watching her sip it slowly.

"I don't know," she answers. "I feel much better now." He suddenly clues in to what she must be thinking.

"Oh." He pauses for a second. "You think maybe you're...?"

"I mean..." She replies, placing a hand on her stomach tentatively. "We may as well find out." She is trying to manage her expectations, knowing it’s far more likely that she'd eaten something that disagreed with her or caught something. And yet...

"Okay, why don't you lie down for a bit while I go pick up a test. There's a 24-hour pharmacy-"

"I have one," she blurts out, hoping he won’t read too much into that fact. "I'll go get it." She knows there are several in her bedside drawer, not wanting Steve to see she'd been keeping a small stockpile, so she fetches one before returning to the bathroom.

"Do you want me to go?" He asks, unsure. MJ shakes her head, thinking to herself how nice it is to have company for once.

"I don't mind." Steve goes to sit on the floor, leaning his back against the wall, the adrenaline of his sudden wake up starting to fade a little. MJ repeats her recent all-too-usual routine, this time with the added comfort of Steve's presence, before resting the stick on the counter and taking a seat next to him on the floor. Both of them are feeling the effects of the early morning, and MJ leans her head against Steve's shoulder, closing her eyes. Silence. They let time pass.

MJ knows two minutes have passed, but she can’t quite bring herself to stand. Normally she gets to be alone with her disappointment after she did this. Today she'll have to share it.

"I think it's been two minutes," Steve finally speaks up, and MJ opens her eyes, unable to delay the inevitable any longer. She stands, approaching the sink, taking the test in her hand.

Her breath catches in her throat. It’s positive.

She turns to Steve, something resembling a smile on her face, but not quite.

"Yep," she whispers. Steve smiles in return, wider than hers. He stands, wrapping his arms around her, squeezing her.

Neither of them say it, but they both sense it in each other, the fear that hadn't been present the first time they'd done this. The first time was nervous excitement, but this time is a more intense fear, one that hangs in the air in their small bathroom. They now know how quickly excitement can fade. It’s harder to be hopeful after that.

But they each pretend not to feel it. Instead, they hug each other tighter, both silently promising themselves that this time will be better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know if anyone is really reading this but I'm going to be posting a new chapter every three days nonetheless! If you are reading this feel free to leave a comment because it would be lovely to know if anyone else actually cares :)


	4. December 1999

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She had hoped this time would be better.

MJ lies in bed, curled on her side, staring at the window as the sun rises behind their bedroom curtains. It’s the second to last day of work before their Christmas vacation, and MJ is desperately counting down the hours until she’s freed for her two week holiday. She and Steve had briefly entertained the idea of going on a trip, but they had both agreed that what they really wanted was just to spend time with each other, comfortably at home, and save their money for the baby. Mostly, they just needed a break - MJ especially. This pregnancy was tiring her out far more than the first. Her first pregnancy had been remarkably easy (until, of course, it wasn’t), but this one was… challenging. She felt sick all the time, completely exhausted, and unreasonably emotional, which was not something she was used to. She found each work day impossibly long, even though she did nothing but sit around all day, the hours crawling by. But soon it would be, at least temporarily, all over, and she’d have two weeks to ride out the rest of her first trimester at home with Steve.

If there was one positive to be found in the difficult past few months, MJ felt her relationship with her husband was stronger than ever. They had developed routines of comfort and support that made her feel like she was never alone. MJ had never been especially good at expressing her feelings, she knew. She was much better at being there for others than allowing others to be there for her, and she was never one to ask for help. Steve had always challenged that, but especially in the past few months, MJ had felt like her failing grasp on her emotions meant she was suddenly relying on him in a way she never had before. He had gotten good at reading her, seeing when she was exhausted and gently encouraging her to go to bed early, sensing when she was feeling especially nauseous and curling up beside her to trace soothing circles on her stomach, which she loved. While normally MJ wasn’t one to admit she wanted to be cared for, pregnancy had mellowed her a little bit, and she appreciated that she never had to ask—Steve just did.

She presses her back against Steve’s side, knowing he was still asleep, but needing to feel his warmth against her even just a little. She can see the sun is now up, and knows any second the alarm will beep and she will have to get out of bed, and a pit of intense dread is forming in her stomach. She really doesn’t want another day to start. She doesn’t quite know why, but for some reason the idea of having to get out of bed, get dressed, get to work, pretend to be fine… feels like far more than she could handle. Her chest is a little tight, and nausea rolls in her stomach, the dread morphing into full-blown sadness.

The beep of the alarm interrupts her thoughts, and as Steve reaches out to turn it off, she rolls onto her back, blinking rapidly up at the ceiling as she feels her eyes involuntarily filling with tears. Fuck. She hates this stupid emotional roller coaster she’d been on.

“Good morning,” Steve mumbles. MJ doesn’t respond, all of her efforts concentrated on trying to stop the flood of tears that is attacking her for absolutely no discernible reason. Steve rolls over to her, confused by her silence, looking at her closely. She gives up on trying to maintain control, knowing Steve is watching her and it’s hopeless, and she lets out a tiny, almost inaudible sob, reaching up to wipe her face quickly.

“Oh, honey!" Steve quickly slides himself closer to her, kissing her on the cheek. She gasps quietly to herself, trying hopelessly to get herself back under control. “What’s wrong, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she answers tearily, her voice betraying her. She has no real answer to the question—nothing is wrong, except she feels a little bit like getting out of bed might kill her, like she is underwater and everything is too much and she just can’t do this.

Steve snuggles up to her, nestling into her side, rubbing his hand on her arm comfortingly. Normally they’d both be out of bed by now, but MJ isn’t moving and clearly doesn’t feel ready to. He stares at her, her face still facing up at the ceiling, a little worried. “Do you feel sick, does it-“

“No, I’m fine. I mean I feel sick, but not…” She takes a steadying breath. “I’m okay, I just got… it’s fine.”

Steve is unconvinced. “You can take the day off, if you feel-“

“I can’t.” She’s starting to move, sitting up in bed, mustering up the energy to start the day. “I only have two days left, and I don’t have any more vacation days.”

“So call in sick. Or tell them you’re pregnant, and you just need a day off, I mean…”

MJ looks at him, something resembling hurt in her eyes, wondering why he doesn’t realize why she absolutely does not want to reveal to anyone that she’s pregnant yet, before the end of this trimester. “I don’t want to do that.”

He nods, understanding, remembering. “Okay, so then we’ll get through the day.”

“Yep.” She slides herself out of bed, finding it in her to get herself dressed, brush her teeth, eat a piece of plain toast. Steve and MJ take turns driving each other to work and picking each other up at the end of the day, sharing the one car, and technically it’s MJ’s turn to drop Steve off at his office, but Steve wordlessly takes the keys and moves towards the driver’s seat, allowing MJ to have a few moments of peace on her way to work. She leans her head against the headrest, closing her eyes, forcing herself not to nod off despite how appealing it seems.

They arrive in the parking lot of MJ’s office, and Steve stops the car, leaning forward to press a kiss into his wife’s forehead. She squeezes his hand, her way of reassuring him that she is alright, before grabbing her bag and heading down the path towards the glass door.

Steve watches her make her way in, and then stays another minute after she has disappeared, thinking, worrying. Eventually he hears a car honk—he’s in someone’s parking spot. So he pulls himself away, driving off, feeling himself get farther and farther from her.

“She’ll be fine,” he says out loud to himself. But he can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong. He turns on the radio, trying to fill the anxious silence.

\--

MJ makes it 2:30 in the afternoon without losing it, and considering how her day started, she’s proud of herself. She’s getting things done, able to motivate herself with the reminder that she’s almost done the day, and then she just has one left before she gets to sleep for two weeks straight. She’s doing okay.

Staring at a spreadsheet, she feels something turn over in her stomach, swallowing hard. She’s not in the mood to get sick at work, always a miserable experience. And then she feels it. A sharper pain shoots through her stomach, her arms wrapping around herself instinctively. Then another one, stronger, doubles her over, and a wave of panic washes over her. Holding her breath, she quickly stands up, grabs her purse, and begins walking speedily towards the bathroom, trying not to call too much attention to herself. Her pace picks up as she gets closer, pushing the door closed behind her, another cramp ripping through her. She moans, sliding to the floor.

She doesn’t need visual confirmation this time. She can feel it. She knows what this pain means, can feel the blood. It’s all too familiar, and she needs to hold on to her ability to think rationally, so she doesn’t want to see. Instead, she reaches a trembling hand into her purse, pulling out her cellphone and flipping it open. She punches in the number for Steve’s office, only realizing when she’s one ring in that she should have dialed his cellphone, but it’s too late, and she hears Sandra the secretary pick up and give her the customary greeting. MJ is friendly with her at this point, but she somehow didn’t register she’d have to talk to another person before she reached Steve, and she realizes too late how frantic she sounds.

“It’s Mary Jane, I need Steve, right now,” she gasps, the urgency of the situation immediately clear. MJ hears a few seconds of music before the phone begins to ring again without a word, and she waits for Steve to pick up.

Steve knows from the second he hears the phone ring. He has no idea why—truly anyone could be on the other end—and yet he knows something is wrong with MJ, feels it deep within him. So when he hears Sandra say “I have Mary Jane for you, I think something is wrong,” he’s practically on his feet already, ready to go.

“MJ, honey?” He asks, and he can already hear her panting on the other end.

“It’s happening again,” she chokes out, confirming his worst fear. He can feel himself struggling to breathe, but he has to keep it together, he knows. “I need you to come here.” She’s having trouble speaking, through the pain and the tears and the sheer panic, and he is terrified at the thought of her alone in some bathroom at work.

“I’m leaving right now, I’ll be there in ten minutes.” He’s shoving his things into his bag with one hand, not quite sure what he needs.

He hears MJ gasp, and then moan, through the phone. “Oh God, Steve, it hurts,” she whimpers, her voice strained. His heart is beating faster and faster—he’s not sure if maybe he’s just forgotten, but he doesn’t remember her sounding like this the last time.

“MJ, I’m going to hang up and call you back right away on my cell, okay?”

All he receives in response is a winded gasp, and he quickly hangs up the phone, redialing her number on the cellphone that is already in his other hand. He rushes down the hallway, not stopping to let anyone know where he is going. In what feels like seconds he is in the car, one hand still holding the phone to his ear, driving way too fast. He can hear MJ starting to cry, and it physically hurts him to hear without being able to hold her, so he drives even a little bit faster.

“I feel sick,” she whispers between gasping breaths. He’s only minutes away, and he can hear his heart pounding in his chest.

“I think you’re just in shock, honey,” he responds, not quite convinced himself, but he doesn’t think nausea is supposed to be a symptom of miscarriage (he did a little research the last time), so he’s hoping that’s all it is. “Do you feel faint?”

She lets out a loud sob, and he begins to wonder how no one is hearing her. “I don’t know, it hurts.”

“I know, baby, I know.” He takes a deep breath, steeling himself. “Okay, I’m two minutes away. Are you able to go get your stuff and get down to the parking lot?”

“Mhmm,” she mumbles, and he tries to listen to see if she is moving.

“Okay, great, that way you can get right in the car as fast as possible.” MJ stands up, finding some strength and knowing she just needs to get through the next few moments.

“I’m going to hang up,” she says simply, and then Steve hears the beep of his call ending. The silence in the car is overwhelming, and he exhales fully for the first time since his phone rang, trying to steady his breathing.

He makes it to the parking lot, and there she is, MJ, face red and cheeks wet, her sweater tied around her waist—hiding the blood, he realizes, feeling a little dizzy. The car door opens and MJ slides into her chair, and within seconds she is bawling, sobbing aggressively. He has quite simply never seen her like this before, and it scares him shitless.

“I think…” She hiccups, “I think I need to go to the hospital.”

He’s terrified.

“Yeah? You don’t want to just go home?” She’s gasping for air.

“It hurts so much,” she whimpers in response. Fuck. He pulls out into the street, taking off towards the hospital, once again driving way faster than he should. MJ is moaning periodically, her eyes closed and her arms still wrapped her middle. Steve can feel his heart break a little bit more with every pained noise she makes, glancing over at her every thirty seconds. He’s terrified at how pale she is, how he can see her whole body shaking, and he reaches out with one arm and rubs her shoulder, trying to provide her even one ounce of comfort. She tries to focus on the feeling of his hand, but all she can feel is pain.

But as the minutes pass, she starts to feel just the smallest hint of relief, her stomach still aching but not the kind of pain that makes her feel like she might pass out at any second. Maybe it’s a result of the three extra-strength Advils she gulped down as she was waiting for him, knowing full well the instructions say the maximum is one pill. She’d been desperate for relief.

“Steve, no, I changed my mind,” she says softly, only minutes from the hospital. “It’s getting better, I want to go home.”

“MJ, I don’t know, it could just be a matter of time until it gets worse again…”

“Steve,” she whines.

“I think maybe you should see a doctor.”

She turns to him, pleading with her eyes, her voice strained with fresh tears. “I just want to go home,” she whispers. He swallows his anxiety once again, knowing it’s her choice, wanting nothing more than for her to just stop crying. He can’t take much more of this—it’s so unlike the MJ he knows, and as much as he always wishes she’d be more open about her feelings, it’s incredibly hard to watch her go from her usual self to this devastated, hurt woman he barely recognizes. So he gets off the highway, and begins to drive home.

\--

Steve stays curled up with her in bed a long time. She keeps shifting positions, trying to find one that might ease the pain a little, until finally she rolls over on her back. Wordlessly, Steve places his hand on her tummy, tracing circles on it and listening closely to the sound of her breathing. Finally, after an hour, he is confident she is asleep, and moving as slowly as possible, he slides out of bed, grabbing her discarded hot water bottle from the floor.

The tears come when he gets to the hallway. Poor MJ. He knows how desperately she wanted this baby, knows how badly she wants to become a mom. He also knows without question that she will be the most amazing mother. He has never met anyone as deeply loving as his Mary Jane, so caring, always ready to put everyone before herself. She’s so warm, gives the most comforting hugs, so fun-loving and funny and just wants everyone to be happy. She was born to be a mom. None of this is fair.

Steve makes himself a cup of coffee, taking the mug with him and heading back into the bedroom along with a fresh glass of water in case MJ wakes up. In their room, he sits in the armchair in the corner, his usual reading perch, but also an ideal spot for keeping a watchful eye on his wife.

She’s asleep, but he can see her face still frowning with pain, her cheeks still red from crying. Steve has seen MJ cry plenty of times—any tearjerker moment in a movie and she’s a mess—but nothing like he had today, not even with the first miscarriage.

God, now he had to differentiate them. The first, the second… He just wanted to make her pain stop. The first time, he’d been so sad for himself, for both of them, but this time he couldn’t stop thinking about her, about how much she didn’t deserve this.

He wishes she could just stay in this sleep until the pain passes, until the mourning has passed, so she doesn’t have to do it all over again. At least right now, she’s at peace. He hates knowing that soon she will wake up and remember it all. He places his mug down on the table, and climbs back onto the bed, curling up behind her but careful not to wake her. He feels the warmth radiating from her, breathes in her scent, the familiar smell of her hair. That’s his Mary Jane. He knows she’s strong, incredibly strong. And he also knows how much this has, and will, hurt her.

He silently promises to hold her as long as she needs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!


	5. December 1999, part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing's ever simple, is it.

MJ knows how this works by now. A day of intense pain, and then the worst is over, though she’ll probably have to suffer through another week or so of bleeding on and off, and a consistent dull ache. What she’s not used to, the new element this time, is how devastatingly, overwhelmingly sad she is. She’d been emotional last time, sure, but not like this, nothing close to this. Steve is playing with her hair, curled up behind her on Friday night, what would have been her last day in the office, as she hopelessly attempts to fall asleep. At least for now, she has stopped crying—the tears come in waves, an endless loop of crying until she’s tired out, and then being hit with another wave of pain that brings a fresh lump to her throat.

She can tell Steve doesn’t quite know what to do, and she can’t blame him. She doesn’t either. Her body feels heavy with grief, as if she might sink into the mattress. She certainly didn’t feel this way last time, like her entire life had ended in a matter of seconds yesterday, like she’d never be able to feel okay again. In fact, the last time she felt this way was…

She immediately berates herself for even having the idea, for comparing the two. These two things have nothing to do with each other, her family (or lack thereof) with Steve completely separate from what happened in college.

Or is it? The thought hits her like a freight train. That year of her life when she’d felt broken beyond all repair, as if she’d been so damaged, so dirtied that she thought she’d never be able to return to normalcy—what if she’d been right? She’d thought she’d done it, thought she’d moved on and, if not fixed the damage, learned how to keep it hidden enough that only she knew it existed. But maybe this was its way of catching up to her. Maybe this was God’s way of telling her she’s just not cut out to be a mom—she hadn’t even been able to protect herself, she’s so stupid, how could she keep a child safe? And she knows, deep down, way deeper than she ever cared to delve, that she’s still broken. She hides it so well, even from herself most of the time, but she still knows she’s a little fucked up, like her brain doesn’t work like other people’s, like she’s not quite normal. Maybe it wouldn’t be fair for her to bring a kid into this world and be stuck with her as a mom… 

The next wave of tears arrives. Steve can tell, even without seeing her face, and he presses a kiss into the back of her head. He’s completely at a loss, knowing nothing will make her feel better and yet desperately wanting to try, despite the deep well of sadness that was burning a hole in his own stomach.

“I don’t know if it’s what you want to hear right now,” he starts softly, “but you are going to be the most incredible mom one day. I don’t know if it’s now, or in ten years, but whenever you’re ready, when it happens, some kid is going to be so fucking lucky to have you as a mom.”

She lets out a loud sob, wishing she believed that. She rolls over, facing him, burying her face in his chest. A small part of her feels pathetic, crying like this, but the pain of what has been lost drowns it out. He wraps her up tightly in his arms, squeezing her, until they both fall asleep.

—

It’s certainly not the Christmas vacation she’d planned on. By Tuesday, the sadness has dissipated enough for her to function a little more normally, though a heavy air continues to hang in the Healy house, for both of them. She walks in on Steve crying on multiple occasions, holding him in her arms, the mutual mourning. She tries to remind herself this is his loss as much as hers, but a small part of her can’t help but think that he doesn’t have to feel the pain, the strange emptiness. She can physically feel it, how empty her womb is. The loss. And then she feels like a terrible wife for thinking she has it worse, when she’s the one who has failed him once again, whose body apparently isn’t able to carry a pregnancy like it’s supposed to. Yet another way in which she’s broken. Wednesday is Christmas Day, and it provides a welcome distraction, MJ’s love of Christmas serving as just enough of a boost to her mood for her to get through the day without crying.

But on Thursday, she’s starting to get a little bit worried. She’s too embarrassed to say anything, thinking maybe she’s just being dramatic, but she doesn’t remember feeling like this a full week later the last time. The pain in her stomach just isn’t letting up, and she’s starting to think it might actually be getting worse. And she’s still bleeding. A lot. She stays silent the whole day, anxiety just bubbling under the surface, convincing herself that she’s overthinking it. Steve doesn’t quite seem to notice, so she’s able to ignore it for herself too.

That is, until she wakes up around 3 in the morning on Friday, and she knows for sure something is not right. She can’t quite place exactly what her body is feeling, but she doesn’t feel well at all, and she’s cold, shivering under their comforter. Instinctively, she pulls her body closer to Steve’s, trying to steal his warmth. Her eyes feel heavy, and she wants to just close them again, drift back off, even though she thinks maybe she should wake Steve, let him know something’s wrong, but before she knows it she has fallen asleep again.

When she wakes up again, the sun is up, and a quick glance at the clock reveals it’s already past 9am. Even so, she still feels foggy. Steve is lying next to her, awake, reading a book. He sees her stirring, putting his book down in his lap.

“Sleepy today, huh?” He asks, smiling. It’s only when he sees her frown that his mood shifts, and he notices her flushed cheeks.

“Steve, I…” She knows she can’t hide this, she has to speak up. “I don’t feel well.”

Shit. His heart rate picks up, already worrying enormously. “What’s the matter?”

She closes her eyes, placing a hand on her forehead. “I don’t know, I just… I really don’t feel good.”

He reaches his hand out, moving hers away from her face and putting his on her forehead. He thinks she feels warm, but he’s not that good at judging temperatures. “Is it your stomach?”

“My stomach still hurts. I think it’s getting worse,” she says quietly, not wanting him to know she’d hidden that from him for a bit. “And I feel sick.”

“Okay, alright,” he says, mostly reassuring himself. He heads towards the bathroom, grabbing the thermometer and taking a second to pour her a glass of water. He sits down on her side of the bed, handing her the water, watching her take a little sip before passing her the thermometer.

He rubs her thigh as they wait for the beep. 101. He looks at her, his brow creased with worry as she reads the screen.

“Fuck,” she mumbles. She can feel the fever on her skin and in her bones, shivering slightly. Steve is staring at her and she closes her eyes so she doesn’t have to see his anxiety.

“We’re going to call Dr. Kim,” he says. He’s trying to keep his tone calm and reassuring, but she starts to retreat into her own worry nonetheless.

“I’m probably just sick, or something, Steve, it’s-“

“Well, she can tell us all that. And if she says we don’t have to worry, then we don’t have to worry.” Somehow he doubts that’ll be the case. MJ takes another sip of water before lying back down, closing her eyes. Steve gives her a rub on the shoulder. “Tell me what you’re feeling so I can tell her.”

MJ takes a deep breath. “My stomach hurts, like cramps. I feel feverish. And just sick, I don’t know, not nauseous but like I have the flu, or something.” She hesitates, embarrassed, but knows she needs to be honest. “And I’ve still been bleeding… a lot. More than last time.”

His brow furrows even more. “You didn’t tell me?”

“I was just hoping it would stop on its own.”

He makes the call in another room, which she appreciates, and while he’s only gone ten minutes, she has drifted off again by the time he returns. He nudges her awake gently.

“Honey, we need to take you to her office,” he says quietly. She very much does not want to get out from under the blanket, but she slides herself out of bed, standing up.

Immediately she sways on her feet, surprised by just how weak and dizzy she feels. Steve reaches out and steadies her, leaping to his feet and putting his arms around her. He follows her to the bathroom, where she assures him she can handle herself, and so he uses the time to grab her favourite sweatpants and a sweatshirt from her dresser.

Steve walks behind her slowly as she makes her way to the car. He’s probably overreacting, he knows, but he still makes sure she’s comfortable in the passenger seat. She hasn’t said anything, but he can tell she feels absolutely atrocious, can read it on her face.

“I’m okay,” she says, his worry overwhelming her a little. He nods. He wishes he believed her.

—

On the car ride home, MJ isn’t crying at all, and Steve almost misses the tears from a few days ago. They were hard to watch, but now she just seems numb, and that scares him more.

It’s only about to get worse. Blood tests confirmed she hadn’t developed an infection, but her doctor gently explained that her body was struggling to complete the miscarriage on its own, and now she needed to help it along to make sure she didn’t develop further complications. Steve had grown angrier the longer the explanation went on. Hadn’t she been through enough? He’d thought this was over, that they could at least start mourning and trying to get back to normal, and now she had been dealt another blow.

He keeps glancing over at her in the passenger seat, not sure if she’s awake or dozing, the little bag in her hand with one single dose of medication in it, which she was to take as soon as they got home to hopefully complete the miscarriage. The doctor had explained that it would probably not be a fun experience, but it was far less invasive than the other option—which she had also explained, making MJ feel sick to her stomach. There was no way she could survive that right now, so she chose the pill.

They arrive home, and she wants nothing more than to just crawl right back into bed and end this miserable day. She knows she needs to start this terrifying process, though, so she sits at the table as Steve makes her a cup of tea and some toast with jam. She needs to eat something to take this pill, but she has absolutely no appetite. She vaguely considers telling him she can do it herself, but she feels so out of it, so unwell, so she just sits, staring blankly at the wall. Steve comes over to her, leaning down to kiss the top of her head and putting the cup of tea and a plate in front of her. She picks up the mug—it feels nice in her hands.

“I’m going to get the room ready for you,” he says softly, and she’s not quite sure what that means, but she nods. Alone in the kitchen, she nibbles at her toast, forcing herself to get it all down, taking a few sips of tea. Finally, she takes the ominous white pill into her hand, grabs herself a glass of water, and swallows it down.

When she gets to the bedroom, she sees their bed perfectly made, and Steve has laid out towels on their mattress. They’d been told the bleeding would probably be quite heavy, and that they might want to put something over the mattress, and she feels her face flush. She climbs into bed, curling on her side in a fetal position.

Steve emerges from the bathroom, seeing her in bed. “Do you want me to stay with you, or do you want to be alone?” He asks. She has no idea what she wants, her emotions impossible to read under a haze of pain and sickness. Her stomach is aching intensely, and she’s not sure if it’s the drug kicking in or just her usual pain.

“I don’t know,” she answers truthfully, moaning a little. He climbs into bed behind her, kissing the back of her neck and beginning to trace the alphabet on her back. Thankfully, the exhaustion kicks right back in, and she’s nodding off within a few minutes. Steve picks up his book, not wanting to leave her side but wanting to stay awake to be ready the second she needs him.

Two hours later, she jolts awake, immediately groaning in pain. He quickly puts down his book, looking at her, noticing sweat bead against her forehead.

“Bad?” He asks, seeing her arms hold her stomach tightly.

“Yeah,” she gasps, wincing. He sees something else wash over her, and she suddenly untangles herself from the blankets. “Fuck, I’m going to throw up.” He follows her quickly as she rushes to the bathroom, falling to her knees in front of the toilet, and he gently pulls her hair behind her shoulders.

“You’re okay,” he whispers, his free hand rubbing her shoulder. He shudders as she retches once, twice, and then finally vomits up the one piece of toast she’d consumed today. He grabs a Kleenex for her mouth, but she retches again, vomiting once more, and then again, before she finally sits back on her heels, feeling finished. He flushes the toilet for her.

“Do you feel any better?” He asks, handing her a cup of water. She takes a small sip.

“I think so.” She drinks some more, the water cool and comforting and her stomach feeling surprisingly settled. She heads back to bed, but no sooner has she curled up under the blankets again than she feels an intense cramp rip through her stomach. She wonders if the Advil she’d taken earlier stayed down, and then decides she doesn’t care and grabs another two from the pill bottle on her bedside table. Steve watches, but says nothing.

He places the trash can by her bedside in case she gets sick again, and he watches as her pain visibly increases, her breathing stopping whenever a fresh cramp hits. She wants nothing more than to sleep, but the pain keeps her awake, her breathing laboured. She sits up frantically again, Steve reading her face and passing her the garbage can, stroking her back as she throws up the water and the Advil. Great. Now, finally, she starts to cry.

“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry,” he says comfortingly. She retches into the garbage again, but nothing’s coming up, and yet she can’t stop heaving. She begins to cry a little louder, wanting to lie back down but knowing her stomach can’t be trusted. Finally, after a few minutes, she places the trash can back on the floor, curling up under the covers as Steve grabs it to deal with her mess. Normally she’d be embarrassed, but she’s beyond caring.

What would she do without him, she thinks vaguely to herself as she hears him run the water. His patience is astounding, and she has no idea what she did to deserve such a caring husband. In fact, she’s quite confident she doesn’t deserve him, and yet here he is, every step of the way, letting her cry, holding her hair, cleaning her vomit and her blood. She’s crying once again, and he hears her, immediately returning to the room. He just can’t let her cry without being there to hold her.

He puts down the garbage and climbs into bed once again, keeping a little distance, knowing she probably wants space, but still stroking her hair from where he is. His eyes fill with tears too. Neither of them say a word. They lie in silence, feeling each other’s warmth and pain and anger and grief. MJ’s breathing starts to slow, and he’s sure she has fallen asleep again, so he’s surprised to hear her speak up 15 minutes later—until he realizes she’s talking in her sleep. Even so, he hears her loud and clear, and he thinks that even though she’s asleep, she means it.

“Thank you,” he hears her mumble. He doesn’t want to wake her, and he knows she can’t hear, but he answers anyways.

“Whatever you need.”


	6. January to March 2000

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She doesn't quite know why, but MJ needs to try again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for some brief discussion of mj's assault

Steve’s birthday falls on a weekend, the Sunday after the first week back at work. Steve had tried for a bit to convince MJ to take some time off, a little sick leave. She likes her boss, a maternal older woman who is always nothing but understanding, and MJ does, for a brief moment, consider telling her the truth: that she just had her second miscarriage in a year and could maybe benefit from a few more days off. She puts the idea out of her head quickly; she doesn’t think she could quite bring herself to say those words, and even if she came up with another reason for needing a medical leave, she’s just not comfortable talking about her health with anyone besides, well, her doctor and Steve.

So they had gone back to work, MJ once again finding the days long and sometimes difficult to get through. A general numbness had taken the place of grief, but she couldn’t shake this heaviness that sat in her body, in her limbs, like she was underwater and something was weighing her down. She periodically found it difficult to breathe, usually prompted by nothing. She’d just be sitting at her desk and suddenly she couldn’t quite get enough air into her lungs, and she’d have to go outside and walk around until she could catch her breath.

The first weekend is such a relief, and Steve’s birthday gives her something happy to focus on. She’s conscious of the fact that he’s hurting too, so she wants to go all out, give him all the joy he deserves. It’s also her way of thanking him for his endless support, patience, care. She gets out of bed early on Sunday morning, preparing a full breakfast: bacon, eggs, pancakes, potatoes, coffee, juice. Probably a little too much. She prepares a tray for both of them and brings it up to their room, figuring he’s probably already awake. She’s right. He’s lying awake in bed as she creaks the door open.

“Happy birthday to you…” she sings, and Steve bursts out laughing. “I’ll save you from more of my singing.”

“No, please finish.” He looks at her expectantly, and she smiles.

“Happy birthday dear Steeeeve, happy birthday to you.” She giggles, looking down at the tray as she places it on the bed. “I should have put candles in the pancakes.”

“I think we can do without,” he replies. She sits on the bed next to him, and he kisses her forehead. “Thank you.”

“Happy birthday.”

—

She gives him his last gift at night, as they’re getting ready for bed, a little MJ tradition—gifts all day long, some big and some small, building up to one final one. They sit on the bed together, already dressed to go to sleep, as he opens up a gift bag containing a thick scrapbook. The cover is clearly designed by hand, and MJ has written in gold calligraphy “The Healys” in the centre. Pictures of them are laid out on every page, from their early silly pictures on adventurous dates, through their wedding, to the trip to Mexico they’d taken last winter. Then the pages go blank.

“We’ll keep updating it as we go. With us, and with our family. When that happens.”

He doesn’t know what to say, still pouring over picture after picture, enjoying each and every photo she’s picked. “It’s so, so beautiful,” he whispers, not wanting to get too emotional. “Thank you.”

“It’s been a wild few weeks. Few months, I guess.” She squeezes his hand. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

He moves the scrapbook off his lap, putting it on his nightstand, and leans forward to kiss her, gently at first and then a little more heated, pressing his tongue against her lips. Her heart rate picks up a little bit, but not in the way she’s used to—something about this feels wrong. She closes her eyes, feeling his hands gently push her down onto her back, and she knows she’s kissing him back out of developed instinct, but her mind is racing off somewhere else, to a dark place it hasn’t been in a while. Steve doesn’t seem to sense anything out of the ordinary, and she’s aware that she’s still kissing him.

He starts to move lower on her, kissing her chest, and then her stomach, and then he starts sliding her pants off, and she’s thinking about blood, about sitting on the bathroom floor bleeding, about visceral pain and fear and sadness, and somewhere in the farthest corner of her mind she’s also thinking about being trapped, and hands roaming her body uninvited, bracing herself as they touch her in places she’s never been touched before, roughly, hurting her. Now she’s bracing herself once more, her whole body tensing as she prepares to feel Steve’s trail of kisses reach its endpoint-

“Stop,” she hears herself say, somehow finding it in her to speak. He immediately pulls back, sitting up.

“What’s wrong?” He asks, concerned that he has somehow hurt her. He’s always careful to be gentle with her, having learned she can be a little bit sensitive and likes to take things slow.

“I’m so sorry, I just don’t think I’m… ready yet.” Her cheeks are growing warmer, and she wants to sink through the floor. “I don’t know why, that doesn’t make sense, I just… I can’t, I’m sorry.”

“Of course it makes sense,” he says reassuringly. He leans in and places a kiss on her forehead, and she closes her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she repeats.

“Don’t be. Seriously. I should have asked.” He too is embarrassed. Her body experienced something deeply traumatic just a few weeks ago, and he realizes now that he should not have assumed she was ready for sex. “Don’t be sorry,” he says once again, seeing her eyes still closed.

The air is a little thick now, so Steve moves. “I’m going to brush my teeth,” he says quietly, leaving her alone on the bed. She doesn’t want to open her eyes—she can’t bring herself to watch him walk away, and plus her lungs are doing that thing again where they can’t quite seem to get enough air.

He’s gone a few minutes, and she feels more and more sick to her stomach the longer he spends in the bathroom. Finally, he emerges, and she quickly ducks out of the room to go to the bathroom herself. She closes the door behind her, turns around, and she’s face to face with herself in the mirror, her blue eyes staring back at her.

What the fuck is wrong with her.

Her shame is burning a hole in her stomach, and she knows she can’t dive any deeper into her thoughts without completely losing it. She brushes her teeth, goes to the bathroom, takes one last look at herself in the mirror, and heads to bed.

She hopes Steve will have the lights off, but of course he doesn’t, he wants to say goodnight. She puts on her bravest face, smiling at him, hoping he doesn’t notice she’s trembling with anxiety.

“Thanks for everything, honey,” he says. She climbs into bed beside him, grateful she’s pretty good at faking it.

“Happy birthday, Steve.”

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.” They turn off the lamps, and the room is dark.

The pitch black and complete silence are overwhelming. Those thoughts MJ is trying to ignore are amplified tenfold, with nothing to distract from them. It’s Steve’s birthday. It’s her husband’s fucking birthday, and she couldn’t have sex with him. She doesn’t even understand why—there’s no logical connection between the loss she’d experienced last month and the fact that she suddenly was disgusted at the idea of being touched, at the thought of such an intimacy. Now he’s lying next to her, probably also wondering what is wrong with her, and she has no idea except that once again she knows she’s broken. Once again, she’s unable to do normal things that women are supposed to be able to do. She’s trapped in this body, feeling the hatred for it that she had managed to bury start to return. Not just the way it looks but all it represents, the way it feels when people touch her and look at her and when she thinks too hard about how she feels living in it. The way it keeps betraying her, and Steve, and the family they want.

She doesn’t sleep a wink that night, spiraling into darker and darker thoughts until the sun rises, unable to stop no matter what she tries. Eventually the alarm goes off and she smiles and drags herself to work once again, where she continues to spiral, this time sitting in a cubicle.

By midday she has reached the conclusion that the only way to fix this situation is for her to, well, fix herself. She needs to make up for what she’s done. She must be able to have a baby. Clearly, she has no problem getting pregnant, and there’s no reason to believe she can’t carry a pregnancy to term. Her doctor had told her that two miscarriages is quite possibly just an unfortunate coincidence, and that fertility tests can be conducted if she has a third. Which she won’t. She just needs to get pregnant again, and this time she will do everything right, take better care of herself, and start a family.

—

Their conversation at dinner that night is quite possibly the most tension they have ever felt between them. She broaches the subject slowly, telling Steve over pasta that she thinks she wants to start trying for another baby as soon as her period comes back, which should be soon.

He looks upset, which catches her off guard. She wasn’t prepared for that, and now she doesn’t know what to do.

“Is that really what you want?” He asks, looking at her with concern. Anger suddenly starts bubbling under the surface, and her eyes narrow.

“What do you mean, is that really what I want? Of course it is.”

“I just mean… I don’t want you to feel like you need to have a baby, or something, or do it for me. Or like you need to prove something. We have so many years to start a-“

“I want to have a baby,” she whispers, in that quiet voice she often uses when she’s angry, the one Steve hates hearing.

“It’s just really soon.” He’s trying to keep his tone caring, which somehow makes her even more upset.

“I’m aware.” She wonders if what he’s not saying is that she couldn’t even have sex with him yesterday, so how on earth is she going to get pregnant. Her anger flares, and she is trying to keep it together and not raise her voice. She goes a different route. “I’m sorry, but you don’t know what this whole thing feels like. Physically. I need… I really want to try again.”

She thinks he might be a little hurt by this, but he doesn’t say anything. Is she being selfish? She isn’t sure. God, she’s so confused, so overwhelmed. Her breaking point is approaching fast, and she’s all too aware of it.

“Why don’t we talk about it when you get your period again. Maybe it’ll feel less… recent,” he says quietly. She nods.

“Okay.” It’s a compromise she can live with, and she needs to end this conversation before she loses it and does permanent damage. She thinks she’ll probably be able to win him over by then. For the second time in five minutes, she asks herself if she’s being selfish. This is for both of us, she answers herself. She’s putting her body through this for him too. She has to be able to do this, for him.

—

Indeed, she does win him over. By the beginning of February, they are once again living in a world of ovulation tests, of sex that MJ tries to enjoy but really just sees as means to an end. She’s still not sure what it is lately that is making her feel so tense about sex, but now she’s able to, at least, handle it, and Steve for his part seems to be enjoying their now extremely busy sex life.

MJ’s third pregnancy arrives with little fanfare. She takes a test by herself, one day at home when Steve is working late. Her breath hitches as she realizes its positive. Well, if nothing else at least she’s good at getting pregnant, she thinks to herself.

She wishes she felt a little more joyous. Instead, she’s just fucking terrified. She wants to be confident, but the plus sign on the stick feels like it means “maybe” and not “yes.” You’re pregnant for now, maybe it’ll stick. Maybe you’ll make it past the first trimester this time.

She goes to pick him up from work after the sun has already set, having spent the last few hours just sitting on her couch lost in thought and anxiety. He climbs into the passenger seat and leans in to kiss her. He’s just pulling away when she speaks.

“Steve, I-“ She catches herself, suddenly realizing she should have planned this better, told him in a better way. But it’s too late and she has to tell him. “I’m pregnant.”

“Already?” He says. And then he realizes that is absolutely not the right response. “Congrats, honey.”

“You too.” He seems as scared as she is, and they sit in silence, no one having any idea what to say.

As she drives home, she thinks back to less than a year ago, when she sat at her office desk and suddenly thought she might be pregnant. She’d been so nervous about whether she was ready to become a mom, with no idea that she was about to spend the next year not becoming a mom and having it slowly chip away at the person she’d built herself into. She knows, on some level, that she’s starting to crumble a little bit. She knows this is bringing up issues she thought she’d long since dealt with, that the comfort with herself that she’d worked so hard to regain after someone stole it is starting to slip away again. She doesn’t know what to do about any of that, so she just has to get to the other side of this battle.

It strikes her that this isn’t how she’d imagined it when she was a little girl. She’s wanted to be a mom since she was small, and she certainly hadn’t thought she’d eventually be sitting in a car in awkward silence, having just revealed her third pregnancy in a year to her husband, who seemed too anxious to even process it. But here they now are, and she is going to make this work if it kills her. Then, at least, if it wasn’t exactly how she’d thought it would happen, that little girl who wanted nothing more than to be a mom would finally get her wish.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always thanks for reading!


	7. May to June 2000

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MJ talks to her mom, and learns that things can always get worse than they are.

MJ knows the phone call is coming at some point today. It’s her birthday—her 26th—and she’s positive she’ll hear from her mother at some point. The thought is in the back of her mind all day at work. As with every pregnancy, and really every big life moment she has ever had, she has this deep, fundamental urge to share it with her mom, almost like a biological need, even if time and time again she has regretted letting her mother in to the most personal parts of her life.

When the phone rings that evening, she’s nervous to answer, the desperate desire to open up to her mom bubbling under her skin.

“Happy birthday, darling!” Her mother’s voice says cheerily, and she finds herself smiling a little.

“Thanks, mom.” She twirls the phone cord nervously between her fingers.

“How has your day been?”

MJ takes a tiny breath. “Good. Actually, I have some news for you.”

“Oh really?”

She can almost hear her heart beating, and she takes a bigger breath, steeling herself.

“Yeah, I’m, uh… I’m pregnant.”

What feels like the longest silence of her entire life ensues, and then her mom quietly says “oh,” and she isn’t sure what the tone of it is, it’s so small.

“Yeah,” MJ says, trying to figure out what is going on on the other end of the line. Her mother finally speaks again.

“Oh my gosh,” she whispers, and MJ thinks maybe, just maybe, she’s crying. “I’m going to be a grandmother.”

“Well,” MJ quickly backpedals. “I’m only 8 weeks along, and I actually, uh…” She hadn’t firmly decided to tell her mother this part, but now that she’s in the moment she can feel the truth tumbling out without her control. “I actually miscarried twice last year. So we’re not… counting our chickens before they’ve hatched.” 

“Oh, honey…” There’s a surprising tenderness in her voice, a sympathy that makes MJ’s heart swell a little. The hint of affection she craves so badly, all the time. “I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you,” she answers, not quite sure what to say and far more emotional than she had expected to be. “So we’re trying again. Hoping it goes better.”

There’s a little pause. Then it breaks.

“I miscarried once,” she hears her mother say suddenly, and she feels a little bit lightheaded as she processes the words that were just said. Nothing could have prepared her for this. Her mother just doesn’t do personal stories, or sharing of intimate details. Ever. “After I had you, before I got pregnant with Christine… we’d just been getting ready to tell you and your brother that you were going to have another sibling and then it happened. It was… very hard.”

MJ is holding her breath. “I never knew,” she says.

“Of course not. Some things you just don’t tell your children. Until they need to know, I guess.” MJ can practically see her mother nodding on the other end of the line. “I understand what you’re going through. It’s difficult. I’m always here if you want to talk.”

She’s in complete disbelief. She hasn’t told anyone besides her doctor about what’s been going on, and it somehow hadn’t occurred to her that what she needed more than anything was to talk to someone who understood—and even so, she would never have turned to her mother for that. But this is… nice. A connection she rarely feels with her mom. If ever.

“I know God is watching over you,” her mom continues. Of course. She should have expected this part of the conversation. “He has a plan for you. That’s what I told myself, when I… I just reminded myself that He was watching, and looking out for me.”

“I know,” MJ whispers, though she most certainly does not know. She struggles more and more with each passing year to understand what God’s plan is for her, or to believe there is one. She’s not even sure she wants to believe in a God who would let her experience the things she has, and yet she also desperately needs to, needs to think there’s a reason for these things and she’s not just being dealt blow after blow by sheer bad luck. It’s one of the great ironies of her life: with every new heartbreak, she feels her trust in God dwindling, and yet she’ll find herself walking by the Church on their corner and feeling called to it, this weird desire to pray coming over her. But she never goes in. She hasn’t gone in since college.

“I’m watching over you too. I think of you every day. We all miss you,” her mom tells her, and she tries not to see it as a guilt trip, not wanting to ruin this moment. “Maybe I’ll come visit you and Steve one of these days. Bring the girls. Maggie is dying to see you.”

MJ won’t count on it, but she appreciates the thought. “That would be lovely. I really want you over. And please tell Maggie she is welcome anytime, we have space for her to stay here for a weekend. Or Christine. It would mean a lot to me.”

“I’ll let them know,” she says brightly, and in the back of her mind MJ knows she won’t, but she doesn’t let herself really think it.

“Thanks, mom. For everything.”

“I love you, Mary Jane. Have a great birthday.”

\----

She’s so, so close to making it out of the cursed first trimester. Days away. And her morning sickness has finally stopped, so she feels even better than she had before, if a little bit tired. She’s starting to show just the tiniest bit, if she really looks closely, which she does often, staring at herself in the mirror and pulling her shirt taut around her stomach. Just a little bump. She’s so proud of it. She’ll rest her hands on her tummy at work when no one is looking, just reminding herself of what’s there.

She feels fine this morning when she first wakes up, nothing out of the ordinary, but as she’s walking down the hall to the bathroom, everything just suddenly starts spinning. She quickly leans against the wall, trying to stay upright, but she can’t see properly and it feels like something is buzzing in her ears. She tries to just take deep breaths, not wanting to worry Steve, but this blurry vision is freaking her out and she thinks she might pass out and oh this is not good.

“Steve,” she calls out anxiously, and he appears in seconds, worried.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t feel well,” she whispers, swaying a little, and he reaches out and places his hands on her upper arms, looking at her closely. “I think I’m going to faint.” She’s still leaning against the wall, and she does look pale.

“Maybe sit down?” He suggests, doing his best to stay calm. She keeps standing, taking a very deep breath. Just as suddenly as it started, her vision starts to clear and her heart rate begins to slow down to a normal pace.

“Okay, no, it’s passing.” She breathes a sigh of relief. “Sorry, I just got scared for a second. I’m fine.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.” The colour is returning to her cheeks.

“I think we should give Dr. Kim a call, just to see what’s going on,” he tells her gently. She hates that he’s right.

She makes the call, and the OB/GYN tells her, much to her reassurance, that dizzy spells and fainting are normal, especially in the last weeks of the first trimester. Something about blood pressure changing. She still encourages MJ to take a day off from work, if she wants, and after just a tiny argument with Steve, MJ admits that that might not be such a bad idea.

“Do you want me to stay home with you?” He offers.

“No,” she quickly answers, “I’m really, really fine. One of us should keep our jobs. And yours is way more exciting than mine.”

“Alright, but you can call me with anything, okay?”

She nods. “I know. I’m fine. Don’t worry.” She knows he will. She knows she will too.

It’s kind of nice to have a day off, and she takes the time to have a nice breakfast, watch a little TV, read a bit of a book she’s been meaning to start. MJ loves being at home alone, loves having time to herself, and she realizes she hasn’t had much of it lately. She missed it.

Everything’s fine until the afternoon, when it happens again: she’s moving from the couch to the kitchen for a snack when the world is suddenly knocked off its axis, and she grips the back of the couch to keep from falling. Fuck. She takes deep breaths, trying not to panic, and once again it passes, but she’s a little more scared now. She wonders if she should call Steve, but she thinks back to her call with Dr. Kim: this is normal. She needs to stop worrying about every little thing, especially if she has 6 more months of symptoms ahead of her.

She decides to take a nap.

She feels strangely sleepy, and she nods off remarkably quickly. When she wakes up again, a quick glance at the clock reveals it’s almost 5pm. Steve will be leaving the office right about now, hopefully. She realizes she feels a bit better than she had before her nap. She also realizes she needs to pee really, really badly.

Her bedroom is about 30 seconds from the bathroom, but as she’s rushing there she’s suddenly so desperate she thinks she might not make it. Another new pregnancy symptom, she muses vaguely to herself, almost laughing at the thought of her having to explain to Steve that she peed herself running the ten feet from their bed to the bathroom.

The second she sits down on the toilet she feels it happen. It’s a shocking amount of blood, as if all the blood she’d shed over a week the past two times just came out all at once. Her heart stops beating, and then picks up with frightening speed, and she’s looking down and seeing all this blood and she doesn’t understand what the fuck just happened.

She stands to take a closer look, but quickly realizes she doesn’t want to see, doesn’t want to look at any of it, and without thinking she flushes, and then flushes again, trying to get rid of it all. Her stomach doesn’t hurt—she doesn’t get that, why she feels completely physically fine—but she knows it’s over, she can feel that it’s all over. She thinks maybe she knew a few days ago but didn’t let herself think it. She hasn’t felt pregnant in days, and she just figured it was because she was entering a new trimester, but now…

The room starts to spin again, worse than the previous times, and she latches onto the sink to try to stay upright, but it’s all going dark. She knows she is sinking to the floor, and still she tries to hold onto the sink, but then she feels the cool tile beneath her and everything goes black.

She’s lying on the floor. She passed out, she realizes, but she doesn’t know for how long—seconds, minutes? She should probably get up, but the tile is cool against her skin, and she can’t convince her body to move. She needs to call Steve, but she just can’t seem to fucking move. And besides, she realizes, he’s probably already on his way home, so calling him will only alarm him. She should just wait.

And so she does. Over and over again she thinks to herself that she needs to get up, but she doesn’t. She’s too heavy to move, her limbs weighed down with shock. She’s glued to the floor, not crying, just lying still.

Finally, she hears a key in the door, and the distinctive sound of Steve coming in, tossing his briefcase down and hanging up his keyring. She needs to get off the floor before he finds her here, needs to pull herself together, and tell him what-

“MJ?” He calls out, not too loudly, probably thinking she may be asleep. “Honey?” She doesn’t understand why she can’t move, and his footsteps are getting closer, and he’s about to realize she’s not in the bed.

Sure enough, she hears him go into the bedroom, see their bed empty, and then his footsteps get faster. “Mary Jane?” This is the next place he’ll look, and from some place deep within her she finds enough strength just to call out to him. Not enough to move.

“Here,” she says. The door is ajar, and he opens it fully, registering the sight in front of him: MJ on the bathroom floor, curled up, frighteningly still. He crouches beside her, trying not to move too quickly, touching her cheek.

“You’re sick,” he says, stating it as a fact and not a question. A lump forms in her throat, and she shakes her head, starting to cry.

“MJ, what is it, can you move?” She’s crying more intensely now, and she knows she needs to tell him but she can’t, she can’t speak through the tears, so she just sobs, and sobs, until he starts to clue in that she’s physically okay, but something terrible has clearly happened, and he’s terrified to find out what. He reaches his arms around her, lifting her off the floor and pulling her into his chest. She collapses into him, taking gasping ragged breaths between sobs, and he squeezes her even tighter.

“Can you tell me what’s wrong?” He asks quietly. She tries to stop for a second, tries to speak.

“I… I can’t… It’s over.” She gets out. “I lost…” She can’t say the words, but Steve understands. He knows what happened. He doesn’t understand how, how this is nothing like the other times, but all he knows is she’s hysterical and not breathing properly and there’s no more baby, as always, there’s no more baby.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” he whispers, words he’s constantly saying to her. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“No, it’s me,” she hiccups. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why the fuck I can’t do this and why we don’t get to be parents and why this keeps happening, I keep trying to do everything right but I can’t, and I just don’t get-“

“Okay, shhh, I know,” he interrupts her frantic stream of thoughts. “I know, it’s not fair. None of this is fair.” There’s absolutely nothing else to say to her, and he draws circles on her back with his hand, trying to bring her some comfort. He doesn’t understand it either, why she of all people doesn’t get to do this when she’s so eager to, and so made for it. It’s desperately, horrifyingly unfair.

“Let’s get you into bed,” he says, placing his hands under her arms and lifting her off the floor. It jolts her out of her hysteria even further, and once she’s standing she quickly wipes her eyes.

“I’m sorry, I’m being dramatic,” she says quietly, suddenly embarrassed.

“You’re really, really not.” He wishes she would just let herself have feelings, especially in moments like this, and not constantly berate herself for being anything less than okay. But that’s MJ. “This fucking sucks. And I hate that you have to go through it.” She nods in response, still wiping the tears from her cheeks.

She changes into pajama shorts and a t-shirt of Steve’s that she likes the smell of, but she doesn’t quite feel like getting into bed, so she turns to Steve.

“Do you want to watch some TV?” She asks. Of course he does—he wants to do whatever she wants to do. And besides, it sounds like a very nice distraction for both of them. They curl up on the couch, and she lays her head down in his lap, allowing her mind to think about nothing except answers to the jeopardy questions on the screen. They both say it out loud if they think they know an answer, and whenever one is right MJ reaches her hand up for a high five without taking her eyes off the screen. For a while she’s able to put the past few hours, past few weeks and months into another room in her head, focusing only on the bursts of joy she gets when she outsmarts the people on her TV.

But as they lie in bed later that night, she is hit by the realization that something ended today. Not just her pregnancy, but something else. Before, when this happened, she still had the tiniest inkling of hope, or maybe it was just stubbornness, but either way, she had felt that this was just a roadblock (albeit a gut-wrenching one) on her way to motherhood. This time is different. Now, for the first time, the thought occurs to her that motherhood might not be on the table for her.

She decides she won’t cry again, so she doesn’t, but she thinks Steve might be a bit—she isn’t sure. She wonders if he’s having the same realization as her, that maybe they’re just not meant to be parents. Or maybe it’s just her, and if he’d ended up with someone else he’d already be a father right now. She’s sure he’s too nice to say anything, but she can’t help but wonder if he’ll grow to resent her the longer they stay childless. She’s already starting to resent herself for it.

“Steve,” she speaks into the silence, her thoughts so loud in her head that she needs to do something with them. “What if it’s just the two of us? What if this is it for us and we aren’t meant to be parents?”

He rolls over to face her.

“First of all,” he starts. “If we never have kids, if this is our family, I will be happy for the rest of my life with you, okay? I’m so fucking lucky to have you.” He’s good at reading her mind sometimes, knowing what’s stressing her and what she needs to her. “Second of all, MJ, if you want to have kids, we’re going to have kids. We can see a fertility specialist, we can adopt, we can do surrogacy. We have years and years to figure this out. We don’t need to fit any kind of timeline.”

That’s true. She’s always imagined her family happening a certain way. She can be a little old fashioned sometimes, a product of her Catholic upbringing, despite how hard she tries to not to be. But there are all these other options. She isn’t ready to think about them now, but she can store that information and come back to it later, when it’s time.

She nods gratefully. “Thank you.”

“I love you so much. So so so much,” he whispers, kissing her forehead.

“I love you too.”

“And I really am so lucky.”

She smiles. “Okay, enough with the sappy.” He smiles in return.

The words still sink in, though, permeating through the wall of protection she so often hides behind. He still feels lucky to have her, even if her body keeps failing them. Even if she can’t do the things he’d expected her to be able to do when he married her.

He feels lucky, but she knows she’s the lucky one. And she realizes that, while she still feels an overpowering sadness too big for words, she still appreciates whatever stroke of luck or divine intervention brought Steve into her life. Clearly not all her luck is bad—some of it is amazing. That’s what she clings to as she falls asleep that night, the night she decides the heartache is too much and she needs to put her dreams of motherhood on hold.

She’s still so very blessed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I PROMISE there will be happiness at some point in this. Just a little more pain to get through first.


	8. September to October 2000

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MJ tries to fill the emptiness that threatens to overwhelm her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi all! Took a little break but I'm going to be uploading chapters again!

She’s doing okay, these days. So is Steve, she thinks. It’s been nice, healthy, to get the baby stuff off her mind for a while and go back to business as usual, a life with Steve she had once really enjoyed, and still does, even if it feels a bit… emptier now. Although Steve is working a lot more lately, coming home late more often. She doesn’t really mind though—the time alone is kind of nice. A few weeks after she miscarries for the third time, she decides she needs a project, something to work towards, so she pulls out the dessert cookbook Steve had given her for her birthday. She’s always loved food, and cooking, but she decides she’s going to get really damn good at baking. She bakes her way through the entire book, and then goes out and buys another one, and bakes her way through that too. She especially enjoys making cakes: she loves how rewarding they are when they come out looking and tasting great. Something for her to be proud of. And Steve loves them too.

A girl in the office, Ally, is pregnant. MJ starts to suspect it before she says anything—God knows she’s familiar with the little tip offs by now, she’s lived through them all three times—and at first she gets some joy out of watching her do such a poor job of hiding it. But after a while she starts to get annoyed at how Ally can’t keep her hands off her stomach. Eventually, Ally breaks the news to everyone that she’s five months along. Then she starts wearing more obvious clothes, and by the time she’s at six months it’s impossible not to notice.

MJ tries so, so hard not to be bitter. She bakes Ally a cake.

She gets an office wide e-mail that Ally’s last day at work will be the 20th of October, and they’re going to have a party for her. An office baby shower. Everyone is asked to contribute money to a gift, and if they want, bring something to eat for the party. She makes the best damn cake of her life, a strawberry cheesecake with a graham cracker crust and a glaze that she pours over the top and lets drip artfully down the side.

“Oooh!” Steve says, coming home from a long day and immediately following the scent into the kitchen as he so often does these days.

“Not for you,” she says hastily. “For a work party tomorrow.”

“A party? It’s the middle of October, what are you-”

“A baby shower.”

She has her back to him, but she can feel his eyes boring holes in the back of her head. She worries he’s about to ask how she feels about that, and she doesn’t want to answer. She changes the subject.

“What do you want for dinner?”

\--

The party is, well, an office party. MJ finds room at a table of people whose company she vaguely enjoys, putting up with the weird awkwardness in the room since it’s more fun than sitting at her desk doing payroll. She gets asked if she really made the cake about 400 times, which puts a bit of a kick in her step—she likes the attention, likes that people have found out she’s quite good at something, has a special talent and isn’t just Mary Jane Healy who sits in a cubicle on the second floor from 9 to 5. She makes a mental note to bring more cakes to stuff. Maybe a strawberry shortcake next time.

But there’s still a little something bubbling under the surface, an awareness of where she is, what’s happening. A baby shower. Something she’s never had—she’s been pregnant three times and never had a baby shower. The jealousy makes her feel like a disgusting human being, but it’s undeniable as she watches Ally get warm hugs and smiles and rest her hands so delicately on her stomach, which is much bigger than MJ’s was when she used to lie on her back with her eyes closed and feel Steve’s hands trace loving circles on her tummy-

Stop, she tells herself. She forces her train of thought elsewhere. She kind of wants to get out of here—it sounds like the girls at her table are about to start talking about babies. They’re mostly younger than her, including an intern who MJ is pretty sure graduated high school like three days ago, and she doesn’t like where this conversation they’re having seems to be headed. She looks towards the food table, thinking about making a break for it and getting herself more pizza. Or some popular strawberry cheesecake.

“You’ve been married what, three years now?” She hears Christine, a colleague who she considers a friend, ask, and she realizes she’s talking to her. “MJ?”

“Oh, yeah, three years and a bit,” she answers, nodding, feeling a bit like the old lady of the group.

“When are you two going to have kids?” She really should have snuck off to the snack table. She swallows.

“I don’t know,” she answers truthfully.

“But you want them? I mean you seem like-”

“I don’t know,” she says again, a little less truthfully. “Not right now.”

They move on to another girl, one who’s complaining about how she’s been with her boyfriend forever and can’t get him to propose, and MJ breathes a sigh of relief. She needs a little bit of quiet, so she excuses herself from the table and heads towards the door. She passes by the food table, grabbing herself a slice of cake. She deserves it.

She figures everyone is downstairs at the party, so she takes her cake up to the second floor and goes to her desk, her little secluded area. She listens to the silence and nibbles at her dessert, wishing they served alcohol at these things. Christine's words are echoing in her head—“you seem like.” Seem like what? She shouldn’t have cut her off. She wants to know what she seems like. The mom type?

Great, now she’s about to cry, she realizes. She’s been doing so well lately, hardly even thinking about it, but as she sits in the eerie silence of the empty office she finds herself wiping tears, fishing in her desk drawer for Kleenex she’s pretty sure she doesn’t have. She sniffles, and then hears footsteps approaching, so she quickly stops herself from making any noise. When she’s sure they’re gone, she tosses her empty paper plate into the garbage and heads towards the bathroom.

She splashes cold water on her face and waits in the bathroom until she’s confident her eyes are less bloodshot and no one will be able to tell she’s been crying, and then she heads back to the party.

\--

“Hi darling!”

“Hi, mom.” The calls have become more frequent lately, every single Sunday night around 8 o’clock. They suddenly started coming in every week after MJ told her mom that she had, once again, lost the baby. She’d been sympathetic, but MJ could tell she was also disappointed, her own hopes of becoming a grandmother having been dashed so soon. She tries to convince herself the now-weekly calls are out of kindness, out of care, though she also thinks they’re probably to keep closer tabs on her. So that she’ll tell her sooner if she gets pregnant again, even though she has assured her mother, truthfully, that she doesn’t currently plan on it.

“What did you bake this week?” She asks, her usual question since MJ told her about her new hobby. It’s nice of her to ask. In fact, everything’s been kind of nice with her mom lately, almost as if MJ getting pregnant shifted something for them, though she has absolutely no idea why. Maybe she’s being overly optimistic, but she can’t help but wonder if maybe she and her mother could actually repair their relationship, find a wavelength. Well, for now, this weekly kindness is enough.

“I made a cheesecake,” she says. “For a party at work.” She considers whether she should tell her more—she hasn’t told Steve about her little meltdown at work, and she kind of wants to talk about it. “A baby shower.”

“Oh?”

“So that was basically terrible,” she laughs. She’ll leave out the part about her crying. She and her mom aren’t quite there yet. “I mean, she’s a nice girl, I’m sure she’ll-”

“You can’t rush God,” her mother interrupts, and MJ wants to respond but she continues: “It’s that girl’s time. Maybe you will have yours one day. It’s not in our control.” 

“I know, but-”

“When God wants you to be a mom, He will let you be a mom. There’s no use in pitying ourselves. He knows what’s right.”

It’s a bit of a sudden shift, from their earlier conversations. From “I’m always here if you want to talk.” Something about this sentiment cuts deep, prodding at MJ’s fears, her worry that she’s just not cut out to be a mother. And then it occurs to her that maybe it’s not God, maybe it’s her own mom who thinks she’s not cut out for motherhood, and somehow that cuts even deeper.

This is how it has been, since she was so small, this constant cycle of allowing herself to believe her mom really cares for her and then having it disproven. Constantly learning over and over again that her feelings were stupid, and embarrassing, until she eventually figured it was best to just keep them to herself. Steve had helped a bit, slowly convincing her to trust him with her heart, coaxing some of her deepest pain out of her over their five years together. But then there were the things no one knew, not a soul, the shame she kept buried so deep inside her that she was almost able to convince herself it wasn’t there.

She has so, so many painful childhood memories, especially from when she was younger and hadn’t yet accepted the way her mother was, when she’d still try and turn to her for comfort and support like children are programmed to. Many of the memories are stupid, and she knows if she said them out loud they’d sound like she was making a mountain out of a molehill, but still, it’s an endless stream of tiny things her mother said to her over the years that to this day make her stomach ache to remember. The repeated “jokes” about MJ being stuck up and conceited, the constant subtle comments about her weight—she was never quite as thin as the other siblings, was always just a little heavier—the time her mom made fun of her for crying when she didn’t do well on a school project that she’d poured her heart into. She wonders why she’s so confident she could give her kids anything better. She has always felt that she could fix these mistakes with her own children, fantasized about giving them the warmest, most loving and supportive home where they always know they can talk to her about anything. But she’d probably fuck that up. She’d probably end up exactly like her mother, and drive them away and that’s why God won’t let her become a mom, because she’s just going to start a new generation of traumatized kids who hate their mother.

“I have to go, mom, Steve just got home,” she says suddenly, wanting out of this conversation. Her mother says a quick goodbye and MJ puts the phone down, a little forcefully.

God’s plan. Lord how she’s getting tired of hearing, and thinking, those words. It’s a justification she’s used endless times for herself, but it gets more and more painful with each passing year. She just can’t understand why God’s plan is for her to get hurt so many damn times, for her to lose three babies she’d wanted so badly, and all the other shit. What could she possibly have done to deserve this? She has a few theories, but she’s not going to get into those now. She’ll just hurt her own feelings even more. She’s finally starting to think that maybe there is no plan, that maybe she’s just fucking everything up herself, over and over again. I mean, isn’t that the more likely scenario?

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know anything anymore.

She decides to make another cheesecake.


	9. December 2000 to January 2001

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Christmas, New Years, and bad news disguised as good news.

It’s their fifth Christmas together as a couple, and considering how much MJ loves Christmas, that’s a very big deal to her. She points it out constantly, and Steve takes to acting like it’s news to him every time—“Wait, how many Christmases have we spent together, four? Whoa, five? That’s crazy!”—but he also thinks it’s adorable how excited she is. She wants to do something special, so they book themselves a five day stay at a fancy resort in the Carribean. The kind Steve’s parents used to take the family to growing up, and that MJ’s family would not have been able to afford in a million years. 

It’s their best Christmas yet, she’s positive, and not just in comparison to the nightmare that was last year’s. Five days on the beach, endless food and drinks and some of the only truly carefree days she has had in years, which may have something to do with the fact that she’s tipsy about 95% of the time. You can always tell when MJ’s drunk, because she remarks on it every ten minutes: “I’m drunk.” And Steve laughs and says yes, I’m pretty sure you’ve been drunk for four days straight, and she says yes, and? and he goes to get them more piña coladas, MJ giggling that if they keep this up they’re going to need to go to rehab one day. They’re both so, so, happy, and they can see it in the other. The extra spring in their step, a little glint in their eyes, an extra electricity between them. They both needed this so badly. For Steve, it’s a break from the ever-increasing demands of work, and for MJ a brief respite from the constant buzz of anxiety that she is so rarely able to escape. 

And then January rolls along, and MJ doesn’t get her period. 

She gives it a few days, trying to write it off as the stress of returning to work, or the temperature change, or something, anything. She tries to convince herself it’s nothing, but she knows she missed a day or two of her pill while they were away, the change of routine throwing her off. And they’d been on vacation, so God knows there were many moments in which she may have gotten knocked up. She still tries to convince herself it’s nothing. By the time she’s five days late she feels like she might explode from not knowing, so she waits for Steve to be at work late, and for about the millionth time in her life, she sits in her bathroom and waits two minutes for a pregnancy test to tell her what’s going on. Finally, she takes the familiar little stick in her hand.

She’s fucking pregnant.

It feels like some sick joke, the fact that she can apparently get pregnant at the drop of a hat and yet can’t carry to term, or anything even close. In her heart of hearts, she honestly thinks there is no way this new baby will make it. The odds are stacked against them. She’d planned on seeing a fertility specialist, some years down the line when she was ready to think about trying again, and now she wonders if it’s too late—can she still start that process while pregnant? She’ll have to look into it. It dawns on her that her brain has shifted almost instantaneously back into the mode it was in a year ago, thinking and worrying and hypothesizing and dreading over this new pregnancy. In the immediate moment, she needs to tell Steve.

She picks him up from work around 8pm, as she does almost every day now. He keeps suggesting they get a second car, but she likes going to get him. He gives her a kiss on the cheek when he gets in.

“I didn’t really think about dinner, so maybe we can pick something up on the way home,” she suggests, leaving out the part about her being too distracted by the terrifying news she had received to think about making food. She isn’t ready to tell him yet, wanting to bring it up at home. She’s starving though, and desperately wants to feel something in her stomach other than the churning of anxiety. 

“Sure, sounds great. I’ve been craving tacos.” He truly has no idea what she’s about to spring on him, and it breaks her heart. She drives, listening to him complain about a case, trying to focus on his words.

She procrastinates a little after they’ve gotten home, eating dinner with him and knowing she has to do it but just not quite ready to say the words out loud. They clean up together, and once everything is tidy and there’s quite literally nothing else for her to use as distraction, she turns to him.

“I have to talk to you about something,” she starts, leaning her back against the kitchen counter. He was just about to leave the room, but he turns to face her.

“That doesn’t sound good.” He’s right, it doesn’t, and guilt washes over her as she realizes how badly she’s framing this news, when technically it should be good, but it just doesn’t feel that way.

“It’s not a bad thing, really, it’s just…” She has no other way to describe it. “I’m pregnant again.” 

He stares at her in disbelief, and then pulls a chair out from under the table to take a seat.

“What?”

“I took a test today, I’m pregnant,” she repeats.

“How? Aren’t you-”

“Well, I was on the pill the first time too, and you still managed to knock me up then, so apparently at least one of us is really good at this. Or bad, depending on how you look at it.” 

He doesn’t seem ready to see the humour in this, and he’s still staring at her.

“Well, shit,” is all he says.

“Yep.” She actually kind of appreciates the fact that they seem to be on the same page here, neither of them trying to act like this is good, or that they have any hope. She’s glad she doesn’t have to put on a front, or feel guilty for fucking hating this. 

He looks at her, as if trying to pick the exact right thing he wants to say.

“If you don’t want to do this,” he says quietly. “That’s okay, you don’t have to. If you think it would be better for us to-”

“Are you asking me if I want an abortion?” Her eyes are slightly narrower than usual. 

“I’m saying the option is there, if you don’t want to put your body through... a pregnancy right now.” She can’t tell what emotion just washed over her, something like shame, but she feels it so strongly it physically hurts.

“I don’t want that. To end it.” She labours over her words, not quite sure what she’s feeling, knowing on a deep, fundamental level that she just couldn’t do that, but not sure why. “I mean, if it’s going to end either way… I guess I’d rather just let nature take its course. I’m not hopeful, I promise, I don’t have my hopes up.”

“Good,” he says. He’s scared for her, at the idea of what she might be about to go through, and for himself at having to watch her go through it once again. He’s always so focused on her through this, barely able to process his own grief in comparison to the pain her body keeps going through. He also realizes that if she did put an end to it, she’d probably spend the rest of her life wondering if she could have had this baby. At least now she’ll know, and hopefully she really will keep her expectations low, fully understand how slim the odds are.

“I’ll still do all the right things, take care of myself in case we get crazy lucky this time. I’ll talk to Dr. Kim about if there are any extra tests I can take, or something. I know it’s a longshot. But who knows, maybe this will be our little Christmas miracle,” she smiles, and then clarifies. “I’m kidding, I don’t really think that.” 

He stands up from the chair and walks towards her, wrapping her up in a tight hug. She sighs as she feels his arms around her, the safety of feeling protected by him.

“You’re very brave,” he says, his head still over her shoulder. “I don't understand how you can just... take whatever life throws at you without blinking, but you’re just so fucking brave.” 

“We’re just getting by,” she answers quietly. It makes her uncomfortable when people say stuff like that about her, that she’s brave or strong or really anything that she knows isn’t true. But he doesn’t let go yet, and she feels her heart rate slowing as he holds her. She knows she has him, whatever happens over the next few months. That’s better than bravery anyways.

She tries to focus on that as she lies in his arms that night, her brain just a little too wired for her to fall asleep. “Christmas miracle.” She wishes she hadn’t made that stupid joke, because now it’s needling itself into her mind, taking hold, begging her to believe it. She was on the pill, she wasn’t planning on a pregnancy, and yet this new baby (she’s trying not to think of it as a baby yet, but it’s so hard) waltzes into her life as a result of the best Christmas she’s ever had. She can hear her mother’s voice: “When God wants you to be a mom, he will let you be a mom.” 

She chastises herself a little. This is not God’s plan. This is faulty birth control, and her own forgetfulness, and the fact that she and Steve hadn’t been able to keep their hands off each other for five days straight. This is simple biology, not a miracle, not God.

If only she could fully believe that.

\--

She’s been doing that thing where she forgets how to breathe again. 

She thought she was done with it, but lately she’ll be sitting at work and she just can’t get air into her lungs. She can usually clear it up with a little fresh air, especially in the January cold. She’ll walk circles around the building for a few minutes and calm herself down. Her colleagues probably think she’s started smoking.

She’s walking briskly down the stairs and out the door, her purse in her hands, trying to get her lungs to work properly. It feels worse than usual—her chest is starting to really hurt. She gets herself outside, and tries to take in the winter air, but she still can’t. She can’t breathe at all, not even a little bit, and now her heart is starting to race too and the burning in her chest is getting worse, a really sharp pain. She clutches at her heart, bending over at the knees. 

It’s been a while since she’s had one of these little episodes. She used to get them in college, but she thought she’d moved on. Apparently not. A visceral fear is taking over her, and she barely has the presence of mind to find her keys, but she somehow does and manages to duck herself into her car to hide, and feel less exposed.

Her breathing is so ragged, and she leans her head back against the headrest of the driver’s seat. Her whole body is shaking, and she vaguely tries to keep still but she can’t and she is just so scared right now. Nausea swims in her stomach—she’s making herself sick, and she needs to calm down but she can’t. She’s starting to get lightheaded, and she desperately does not want to faint here in her car. 

She turns on her radio, and it’s thankfully tuned to something nice, some vague voices talking about arts events in the city. She doesn’t care, just needs a little noise, something to listen to. It seems to work. She listens to them talk about the symphony, trying to focus on every word, and she finally manages to take a deep, gasping breath, and then more steady ones. The fear starts to subside, and the fog that had taken over her brain is washing away. Thank God.

Well, that was terrible, she thinks, and really not a good sign overall. What is this all doing to her? She hasn’t panicked like that in years, not even when things got really bad, and now here she is hiding in her car at work because she can’t pull herself together. Tears are springing to her eyes, but she blinks them back, trying to get herself under control. The workday is nowhere near over.

She’s calmed down, but she’s still trembling, her hands especially. She goes to turn the volume off on the radio and can see how her hand is shaking like a leaf. The thought occurs to her that she could tell her boss she’s sick and go home, but then she thinks she should probably save her sick days for the miscarriage she’s almost certainly about to have. (She can never decide if it’s morbid or just realistic for her to just think of this pregnancy as a countdown to her next miscarriage, but it’s probably better than trying to convince herself she might actually stick it out).

When she’s confident she can pass for sane again, she goes back to work, her to-do list not quite getting the attention it deserves due to her added dose of distraction. She’s shaky all day long, and her chest still aches, a little reminder of how badly she lost it earlier.

She makes dinner for Steve that night, and then picks him up from work. They eat together, and he seems to notice she’s not quite right, but he puts off asking until he can’t ignore it anymore.

“You okay?” He asks gently, watching her stand up from the table to clear her plate, her dinner unfinished. 

“I’m kind of not feeling so great,” she says honestly, knowing he’ll just assume that morning sickness is bothering her, or something. They head to the couch, cuddling up together in front of that night’s Jeopardy. She’s quieter than usual, and he realizes she’s nodding off almost as soon as they start. She must be exhausted, he thinks to himself. 

She’s even weirder as they get ready to climb into bed that night, though he can’t place how. She’s really jumpy; he dropped a plastic cup earlier while she was walking out of the bathroom and she let out a tiny yelp, before laughing it off, a little embarrassed. He can feel how tense she is as he curls up behind her, and she grows stiffer as he pulls her into him. He asks her again, trying to give her a reassuring rub on the shoulder.

“You’re sure everything’s okay?”

He feels her nod against his chest. He wonders if he should pry a little more.

“MJ, if this is getting to you, that’s okay, it’s getting to me too.”

She has no idea what to say. Of course it’s getting to her.

“I’m fine, Steve. Can we go to sleep?”

He sighs to himself. He hates when she gets like this, shutting him out when he can tell she’s not okay. It’s so hard to reach her once she’s decided she doesn’t want to be reached.

“Goodnight, honey,” he murmurs to her.

“Goodnight.” He turns the light out, before settling back down and curling up with her once more. She won’t talk to him about whatever’s going on, but he tries to get her to feel his support as he holds her. It’s all he can do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading!


	10. February 2001

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MJ takes a surprise trip to her OB/GYN, and talks to her mother.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whoops i've been forgetting to upload these.... sorry!!!

On Friday afternoon, she’s bleeding a little bit. 

Immediately, the strangest mixture of panic and relief immediately comes over her as she stands in a bathroom stall at the office. Here it is, what she’s been waiting for these past few weeks. She feels fine, and she just needs to drive home and get through this and then she can go back to normal.

Then she realizes she’s being dramatic. It’s literally a tiny spot of blood, the kind every single pregnancy book told her is entirely normal. She has an appointment scheduled for next week, but she decides to give Dr. Kim a call now, physically forcing herself with all her might not to hope. And Dr. Kim tells her to come in. So she packs up her stuff and, as she has done so many times, heads in to tell her boss, Kayla, that she needs to take off.

“That’s fine, no problem at all,” her boss tells her, and she’s about to say a quick thank you when Kayla stops her. 

“MJ, I don’t mean to pry, but is everything okay? I really don’t mind, at all, but you’ve been taking a lot of last minute time off for the past while. I just want to make sure you’re alright.”

She’s kind of touched, that feeling of warmth you get when someone asks if you’re okay when you’re really not, but can’t bring yourself to say anything. MJ gives her a small smile of gratitude. 

“I’ve been dealing with something for a while, a bit of a… health thing. It’s fine, I’m okay. Thank you for asking.”

Kayla nods.

“Take care of yourself. And take all the time you need, your health comes first, okay?” 

MJ is almost a little emotional. She’s been carrying this weight around for so long, only sharing it with Steve, and briefly her mother, and she’s starting to feel like such a burden on her husband for being such a mess. In the back of her mind, she clocks how nice it felt to tell someone, however vaguely, that maybe she hasn’t been doing well lately. But she needs to get on with this, so she thanks Kayla again and heads to her car.

She dials Steve’s cell as she’s pulling out.

“Hi honey, everything’s okay, but I just wanted to let you know I’m heading to Dr. Kim’s to get a little checkup,” she says quickly, not leaving him a single second to speak.

“Why? Is something happening?”

She tries to make it sound as unalarming as she possibly can. “Just a tiny, tiny bit of blood, nothing crazy, and she thought maybe she could take a look and see what’s going on, if anything can be done, I guess.” 

“I’m coming,” he answers immediately. Of course he wants to, she thinks, but in a strange way that makes her more nervous, makes it seem more real. 

“You really don’t have to, I’m fine,” she says, knowing she’s wasting her breath. He’s going to come no matter what she tells him. 

“I’m still coming. I’ll take a cab.”

The clinic is around the corner from her office, so she’s there in two minutes, and she knows Steve will take a little while. Dr. Kim pokes her head out of her office immediately and waves her in. 

“My husband will be here soon,” MJ explains upon entering. “But we can start now.” She takes a seat on the examination table, her feet dangling off the edge, twitching nervously. She’s used to the little routine of testing, prodding, questions by now. She sits patiently, willing herself to keep her cool, staring straight ahead, as her doctor pokes at her and jots things down in her file, asking her about symptoms, what she’s been feeling lately.

“Your blood pressure is really high,” Dr. Kim says suddenly, furrowing her brow. MJ almost laughs. That tracks. “Hmmm.”

“What can I do to get it down?”

“Well, take good care of yourself, and reduce your stress levels, mostly. How’s work, do you find you’re under stress?”

She considers for a moment. “No, work is fine, pretty relaxed.”

“And other things?” MJ doesn’t quite know what to say, or rather, what she wants to say. No kidding her blood pressure is high, when she’s so freaked out all the time she can barely breathe. But she hasn’t told anyone that, at all, ever. She’s so deeply embarrassed of the fact that she sometimes feels like she can barely handle everyday life, like other people are just able to get through their days while she drowns under the pressure and the worry. Not just in pregnancy, but since she was in college, or maybe since she was a kid. She has always found life overwhelming in a way she doesn’t quite think is normal. She doesn’t know how to admit that, even to herself, most of the time. But then she also thinks about how nice it felt to tell Kayla even a little bit of what was going on, and this is her doctor, who she really should be able to talk to if something’s wrong, and if the stress is affecting her pregnancy…

“I’m really… anxious. A lot of the time,” she says very quietly.

“I see.” Dr. Kim looks at her sympathetically, reading how uncomfortable MJ is admitting that. “Is that new with your pregnancy, or just something you feel in life in general?”

MJ swallows. “Um, I guess in general.” Her cheeks are burning, and she can’t quite make eye contact.

Dr. Kim places a hand on her knee, trying to meet MJ’s eyes. “Have you thought about talking to someone about your anxiety? I can refer you to someone.”

MJ swiftly starts to backtrack, desperately not wanting to be forced to see a therapist or something, knowing she would hate that. “It’s really not that big a deal, I’m okay.”

Dr. Kim nods. “Well, what you think is best is what’s best for you. But it’s actually quite common to develop an anxiety disorder during pregnancy, or for women who already have one to find it heightened. Please don’t hesitate to ask for help if you need it, okay?”

The words fall harshly on her ears. She has always known she was an anxious person, but no one has ever suggested she might have an anxiety disorder before. That scares her—the suggestion that something might be wrong with her brain, that she actually is messed up. Her palms are starting to sweat. Surely that’s a bit overdramatic, she tries to tell herself, and yet she finds herself remembering all the little episodes of random panic she’s had over the years, the times she had to sneak out of class in college because she suddenly couldn’t breathe… 

“I’m okay,” she says again, both to her doctor and to herself. “I don’t think it’s that extreme, I’m just a bit of a worrier, that’s all.” 

“Alright,” Dr. Kim says. “In any case, let’s try to keep your stress levels down, okay? I’m going to do an ultrasound, and then we can talk about what we’re going to do about your blood pressure.”

An ultrasound. Thankfully, there’s a knock on the door, and then Steve’s head pokes in. MJ nods, signalling for him to enter.

“I have high blood pressure,” she says cheerily, greeting him. 

“Lovely!” 

He sits by the table as MJ lies back, wincing at the oh so familiar cool gel. She almost doesn’t want to look, doesn’t want to see yet another baby inside her and start thinking about what might-

Oh. There it is. She and Steve look at the screen, and Dr. Kim points to a spot on the screen, though they’re well practiced enough by now to see it on their own. “There’s baby Healy,” she says softly. Steve nods. 

Some more prodding, and then Dr. Kim wraps things up and hands MJ a wad of paper towel to clean herself up. 

“Everything looks fine, so the only thing I’m quite concerned about is your blood pressure. We’re really going to want to get that down.” Steve and MJ are both nodding vigorously, ready to take whatever suggestion they’re given. “Unfortunately this is not going to be fun for you.”

Uh oh. MJ steels herself, and Steve’s hand comes to rest on her thigh, rubbing it gently.

“I’m going to put you on complete bed rest for at least the rest of the first trimester. That means staying in bed or on the couch all day, getting up only to use the bathroom, or to quickly grab something to eat or drink, and then right back to your couch. No cooking, no cleaning. Steve, she’s going to need a lot of support.”

“Oh God,” MJ moans, right as Steve says “of course” firmly. She’s eight weeks along—that means six weeks of bed rest at least. Holy shit. 

“I’ll see you for more regular check ups to see if it’s helping. And high blood pressure on its own is not the end of the world, but it does leave you at risk for developing further complications. Hopefully this will help with some of the issues you’ve had in the past.”

\---

They stop at Blockbuster on the way home, MJ enjoying her last few moments of being allowed to freely roam the world. She picks up the first two seasons of Charmed, trying to figure out what on earth she’s going to do with her time. Between that and reading, that should last her… a week. She’ll have to send Steve back next week for something new.

“You don’t want to watch something you’ve never seen before?” He asks playfully, eyeing her selection.

“Hey, it’s my bed rest, I’ll watch what I want,” she answers. 

She calls Kayla not long after she gets home, a little awkward after their earlier conversation, but she’s grateful she at least laid the groundwork for this news by already informing her something had been going on.

“MJ! Is everything okay?” Kayla answers when she realizes who is calling, surprised to be hearing from her after she took the day off.

“Yes. Well, no, not really. I have some… news.”

“What’s happening?”

MJ takes a deep breath. She’s told so few people, but she doesn’t know how to have this conversation without being honest. There’s just no way around it. “I’m actually pregnant.”

She hears a little laugh. “Yeah, I kind of guessed as much.”

She blushes a little. Was she that obvious? 

“Well, I’ve had some issues, with this and with… previous pregnancies. And now I’m being put on bedrest. So I’m going to be off work for… at least a few weeks, but probably much longer.” 

“Oh no,” Kayla says softly. “Okay, well don’t worry about anything, and please take care of yourself. We can talk about this a bit more later.” 

“Thank you,” MJ replies. “And thank you for being so understanding. It’s made this a lot less stressful.”

“I hope you’re okay, and everything goes well. And keep in touch, let me know how you’re doing, okay? You’ll be missed around here.”

“I will, thank you.” 

She hangs up, feeling a bit of a weight off her shoulders. That’s one thing dealt with. She is officially off work, with nothing to do but sit around and, well, grow a baby, she supposes. She sighs to herself. 

A month and a half ago she was convincing herself this was nothing but an eventual miscarriage, a few weeks she’d have to get through before it would all end and she could go back to normal. Now, she’s putting her entire life on hold to try and carry this baby. She’s leaving her fucking job for this. For the chance that maybe it’ll work this time. But, on the other hand, maybe this bed rest will be just what she needs to finally make it happen.

She thinks to herself that she should go make them some dinner, before she remembers she can’t. Steve hasn’t gone to the grocery store to pick up pre-made meals for her yet. She can’t cook for herself anymore. If she wants a meal, she’s going to have to ask Steve for one. Which is ridiculous. A tiny voice in her head whispers that she could just get up and make her own dinner anyways, but she tries to quiet it—it’s literally day one of this, way too early for her to start saying fuck it and disregarding the rules. So she starts to think about what she’s going to ask Steve to bring her.

Just then, her phone rings again, interrupting her thoughts. Maybe Kayla has other concerns. She picks it up.

“Hello?”

“Hi darling!”

Her mother. On a Friday. Her eyes narrow.

“Hi, mom. Everything alright?”

“Yes, of course, I just wanted to talk to you, see what’s up.” She vaguely considers the idea that her mom had some kind of motherly intuition and sensed that something was wrong, but then she decides that if there is such a thing as motherly intuition, she doesn’t think her mom has it. It’s probably just coincidence. “How are you doing?”

She takes a deep breath. “Um, not great. I got put on bed rest.”

Her mother lets out the tiniest gasp. “Really? Oh, sweetie.” 

“It’s okay, I’m just going to watch TV, sleep a lot, read books. It’s fine.” 

“Is Steve taking care of you? Is he going to take time off work?” She sounds a little distrustful, which rubs MJ the wrong way.

“He’s taking great care of me. He tried to insist on taking time off, but I wouldn’t let him. One of us needs to make money,” she explains calmly. “And I can take care of myself, he’s just going to prepare food in advance for me, and we’ll make sure I have everything I need in the morn-”

“I really think someone should be at home with you,” her mother says harshly. “I’m sure he can take the time off, you guys have the money.” MJ rolls her eyes—this is a new one in the repertoire of her mother’s favourite things to dig at her over, the fact that she has more money than the rest of the family, as if she lives some extravagant lifestyle.

“We’re not rich, mom. And I really don’t need twenty four hour care, I mean, if I need to get something while he’s at work, I can wait or I can brave the two second walk to another room. I’m allowed to switch rooms.” She’s annoyed, fiddling with the blanket she’s seated under.

“I’m going to come there, and look after you,” her mother says suddenly. Oh good lord. That is truly the last thing MJ needs.

“No, that is really not necessary, and we don’t have that much space-”

“I will pack up and I’ll be there by Monday, for when Steve goes back to work. We can spend time together, it’ll be nice.”

It most certainly does not sound nice, nor does it sound good for the stress levels she’s supposed to be keeping down, considering her mom is like number 3 on her list of stressors. But she’s also pretty sure it’s already a lost cause, considering how firmly her mother has decided this. She sighs loudly, not caring that she’s probably being heard on the other end of the line.

“Alright, mom, come for a bit. Maybe a week or two, okay?”

“Okay. I can’t wait to see you.” MJ forces herself to take a deep breath. She’s being unfair. It’s nice of her mom to want to come take care of her, and maybe it will be nice to spend a few weeks with her, and bond a little. Things have still been more or less fine between them lately, and this could be just what they need to repair their relationship.

“Me neither. Bye, mom.” She hangs up.

Steve appears in the doorway, almost instantly, clearly having been listening.

“Your mom?”

MJ gives him a look, a very sarcastic smile. “Oh yeah. Get ready to see a lot of her, because apparently she’s staying over.”

“Oh.” Steve is a little bit speechless, and she can’t blame him. This certainly is not what either of them would have expected. But there’s nothing to do now except accept it. She sits up straighter on the couch.

“Alright, chef Steve, what are you making me for dinner?”


	11. March 2001

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MJ's mom arrives at the Healy apartment.

Steve is not the biggest fan of Carolyn Gardner. 

The first time he’d met her, he thought she seemed nice enough at first, despite MJ having warned him that her mother is “kind of awful.” But even by the end of their first dinner together, he’d started to see through the outer layer of friendly kindness, noticing how subtly and easily she was able to make MJ feel absolutely atrocious about herself. Mrs. Gardner was extremely traditional, a very conservative Catholic. She encouraged her daughters, her three girls, to go to college in state, graduate, and then settle down to start a family, and she absolutely despised that MJ had bigger plans. MJ’s childhood dream of becoming a novelist, a dream she had chased to a fancy creative writing program in Illinois, did not fit in to what Mrs. Gardner envisioned for her daughter’s life. Lucky for her, MJ had eventually decided big dreams were for other people, and that, for better or for worse, she was satisfied enough with a comfy administrative position for a publishing company and a pleasant life with her husband. (MJ couldn’t quite pinpoint when exactly she’d lost her ambition, and her passion, but at some point in college they were just gone, and she had no idea how to get them back, so she didn’t. She finished the program, and always got great marks, but she just… didn’t quite care). 

Steve grew to dislike Mrs. Gardner more and more the longer he spent with MJ, and the more access she gave him to her heart, and its wounds. Sometimes, when she’d had too much wine, MJ would tell him stories of the various upsetting things her mother had said or done to her as a kid, brushing them off as no big deal despite the fact that clearly they were a big enough deal for her to have carried them around on her shoulders for years and only unloaded them after three glasses of Chardonnay. A writing contest she’d won that her mother had subsequently complained was too easy, never even bothering to read her submission. Things like that. So Steve didn’t like the woman, and hated how much she had hurt MJ.

Now here she is in his apartment, in MJ’s apartment, sleeping on a cot he’d set up in the study, so she can “take care” of MJ when he heads off to work this morning. She arrived yesterday, and he smiled and accepted her presence and did his best not to ruffle any feathers—his mother-in-law’s or his wife’s. Despite the fact that he hates the way MJ’s mom treats her, she is still her mother, and he can read in MJ’s demeanor that in her own weird ways, she needs her. And he can’t pretend it isn’t comforting to know someone will be home with her all day, hopefully not torturing her too badly.

They start the day as they start every day: MJ seated on the bathroom floor, beside the toilet, head resting against the wall as she fights her daily battle with her stomach. She wins about half of the time. At first, Steve had sat beside her every morning, stroking her hair, but once they realized this would be a daily occurrence, he started just quietly brushing his teeth and getting ready for his day, giving her some space and the occasional loving squeeze. He’s just grateful she tends to get her morning sickness in, well, the morning, before he’s left, and he isn’t going to be leaving her alone sick and with her mother. Out of the corner of his eye from the sink, he sees MJ start to move, having decided she’s fairly confident she won today’s battle, and he turns to her quickly.

“Let me help you up,” he says, but she is already pushing herself up off the ground.

“I can stand up on my own,” she replies, a little quietly. It’s too late now, she’s already up, and he bites his tongue. He knows this whole bedrest thing is difficult for her, especially considering how independent she is. It’s hard enough at the best of times to convince MJ to lean on him for little things, and now she’s expected to let others do everything for her. He can tell she feels weak, and knows how much she despises that. So he decides not to argue with her, especially since she still looks like she might puke all over him.

“I’m going back to bed,” she says, heading out the door slowly. He finishes getting ready, and he’s scarfing down a slice of toast in the kitchen when his mother-in-law appears, fully dressed in a pair of jeans and a blouse.

“Good morning, Steve,” she says brightly. He places his coffee down on the counter.

“Good morning.” He’s never quite sure what to call her. Mrs. Gardner seems way too formal for the mother of a woman he’s been with for over five years, but Carolyn is a little too personal, and he’s not about to start calling her mom. So he just avoids.

“Is Mary Jane still asleep?”

“She was up sick, and went back to bed. She usually gets sick around now and it passes around 9. So she’ll probably get up around then.” He hopes he doesn’t sound passive aggressive, though he is significantly annoyed by the whole situation. He’s done this whole thing four times, knows MJ’s schedule and her symptoms and what she needs at any given moment, and now this woman who has never been here before is barging in to take control and he’s left feeling guilty for having to go to work. Hopefully she can’t read all that in his answer. “She’ll probably want some tea when she gets up.”

There’s an undeniable tension in the room as Carolyn nods. “Alright, I’ll make sure to have some for her.” 

He goes to get the living room ready for her, but pauses at the door, turning around again. “She likes the peppermint.”

When he heads into the bedroom twenty minutes later to say goodbye, having prepared the living room with everything he thinks she might need all day, she’s under the covers, eyes closed, but he’s pretty sure she’s awake—he can feel it. 

“Goodbye, honey.”

She doesn’t move, but he hears her muffled voice.

“Bye Steve.”

“Good luck,” he says quietly, and he hears her laugh. He means it, though. He hopes this doesn’t make things even worse for her.

\---

She takes her first nap of the day just before noon, less than three hours after she gets out of bed and immediately settles in on the couch. She doesn’t mean to fall asleep, but there’s something so genuinely exhausting about doing nothing all day—as if she never quite had to commit to waking up in the morning, so for the rest of the day she’s fighting not to just doze right off again. So she does, and when she wakes up, an episode of General Hospital is on TV, and her mother is sitting in the armchair next to her. 

“Oh, good morning again,” her mother says, seeing her stir. “I was going to wake you up soon, you’ve been out a little while.” 

She’s a little disoriented, groggy, and it’s kind of surreal to wake up and see her mom in her living room after years of her never even stepping foot in her apartment. She blinks a few times, processing. 

Her back is killing her, the result of three days straight curled up on the couch and falling asleep in an awkward position. Plus she’s starving—she hasn’t eaten yet today, and now that the nausea has passed her stomach is grumbling for something other than peppermint tea. Steve has left a box of crackers and a granola bar on the coffee table in front of her, but she needs something real to eat. She’s going to have to ask her mom to make her something. Like she’s eight years old. 

It wouldn’t feel as stupid if Carolyn offered, and MJ eyes her mother, whose eyes are tuned to the screen, willing her to do her one job here and ask if she needs anything. It’s not going to happen. MJ isn’t sure why this is so unsettling for her. She could handle anything else, but something about asking her mom to get her food just brings her right back to being 15 and getting disdainful looks as she opened the pantry: “This is why you’re not getting your weight down, you know.” 

And God her body is sore. She needs to walk, stretch just a little bit before she settles in for her next few hours of lying down. She’ll just make herself a sandwich. Surely that won’t kill her. She moves to get up.

“Do you need something?” Oh, there it is. 

“I’m just going to get myself something to eat,” she says firmly, hoping she can maybe get away with that. She really needs a breather, a little moment off the couch. 

“No, I’ll go, what do you-”

“Mom, it’s fine, I can go.” She is on her feet now, and her mother leaps up too, rising to her same level. They stand there for a moment, looking at each other, waiting to see who will move first. Somewhere in the back of her mind MJ knows she shouldn’t be doing this, and it would be so easy to just sit down and let her mom bring her something, but now it has become a competition, and she doesn’t want to lose.

Her mom looks her in the eyes. “I’d expect you to be a little more willing to do what you can to protect this pregnancy, by now.”

It’s like a knife to the heart. MJ looks at her mother, hurt evident in her eyes. “Oh. Okay.” Carolyn can see it in her face—a step too far and she knows it. The cruelty of her own words hangs in the air, and suddenly they both desperately need to get out of the room.

“I’m going to make you lunch,” Carolyn says quietly, just as MJ starts to head off in the other direction. “Where are you going?”

“I need to go to the bathroom.” She doesn’t, but considering it’s the only place she’s allowed to go, it’s all she’s got. She closes the bathroom door behind her, a little harder than she intended.

She absolutely does not want to cry right now, because she has no chance of hiding it from her mother if she does. And if she spends more than a minute in here, she’ll get suspicious. She sits down on the edge of the tub, burying her face in her hands. Her breathing is speeding up, her heart starting to pound, her cheeks are burning—not this. Not now. 

She takes a huge breath in, then out, in, then out. It works, thank God, and she manages to calm herself down before she spirals too far out of control. Still, she realizes, this is not good. The whole reason for this is to get her stress levels back down, keep her body as relaxed as possible, and here she is on the verge of hyperventilating in her bathroom. She takes one final steadying breath, and splashes some water on her face, trying to cool herself down. Then she pats her face dry and heads back out, retiring once more to her spot on the couch.

Her mother emerges from the kitchen a moment later, a sandwich prepared for her and vegetables sliced neatly beside it on the plate. She takes it, trying to give her a small smile.

“Thank you.” There’s something odd on her mother’s face, like a hint of an emotion that MJ thinks just might be guilt. She wonders briefly if maybe she’ll get an apology.

“You’re welcome,” she says instead. MJ eats a carrot, turning her attention back to the TV, ready to try and move on and pretend nothing had happened, pretend she won’t be thinking about what had just been said for days, possibly years, to come. “I’d expect you to be a little more willing to do what you can to protect this pregnancy, by now.” As if she hadn’t done what she could have before. As if her own irresponsibility has been causing all this, like she’s to blame for the fact that she had lost the previous three. A thought she has had so many times, and yet to hear someone else say it, someone else acknowledge that it was her fault, especially her mother…

“We need to try not to fight,” her mom says suddenly. No kidding, MJ thinks to herself. “Since we’re trying to keep your stress levels down.” It’s such an absurd thing to say, but MJ also realizes this is probably her twisted way of apologizing, her way of saying she’s going to try and be nicer.

“Yeah,” she responds simply. 

“I changed the channel while you were sleeping,” Carolyn tells her, awkwardly switching the subject. “I thought if it got too quiet it might wake you up, but we can change it back to whatever you want.” 

MJ smiles at her again, nodding. A little peace offering. “I got Charmed from Blockbuster, if you want to put the first disc in.” She motions to a little pile of DVDs next to the TV, and her mom heads over.

“I’ve never watched it,” she says, putting the disc in.

“Oh, it’s kind of terrible,” MJ laughs. “But fun. We’ll start from the beginning.”

Carolyn smiles genuinely, taking a seat back down on the armchair. The weight that was hanging in the air has lifted, and MJ silently prays that her mother will keep her word, and not pick any more fights. Something has shifted a little bit, she realizes. Like they needed to get that tension out of the way before they could settle into something decent, maybe even nice. She sighs. Maybe this can work.

\--

Steve comes home right away after work, and she’s never been so happy to see him in her entire life, she thinks. Although, despite its big rocky moment, her day was actually not terrible. She miraculously managed to just not quite think about the words that were had, and everything shifted into a place of civility, a place she can definitely occupy for a few more weeks. Assuming it stays like this.

They eat dinner the three of them, in the living room, MJ and Steve together on the couch and Carolyn on her usual chair. It almost feels normal, like an understandable routine. Routine is big in the Healy household, their love for it being something MJ and Steve have always had in common. Carolyn does the dishes, and it’s kind of nice for that to be taken care of. MJ is feeling more and more like she could get used to this arrangement, and as hesitant as he is to admit it, Steve is taking great reassurance in his mother-in-law’s presence. Now that he thinks about it, he doesn’t know how he could have handled his full work schedule, and taking care of MJ full-time. This is good.

They wait for MJ’s mother to retire to her makeshift bedroom in the study before finally having some time just the two of them, to debrief. Steve gets MJ’s pajamas for her, and watches her closely while she gets changed, and goes to brush her teeth, keeping guard.

“I’m not going to fall over,” she says jokingly, his constant gaze a bit much. “I’m not sick, Steve, just pregnant.”

“I know. Just making sure you don’t overexert yourself.”

She smiles. “I got it.” 

“So. How were things today? Honestly.”

MJ pauses, the answer far more complicated than it should be. “Mostly good, and also fucking awful. But mostly good.”

Steve looks at her sympathetically. “Well, that’s a start, I guess. What was awful about it?”

“Oh, my mother thinks I keep miscarrying because I don’t take care of myself properly, but-”

“Wait, what? She said that?” Steve can already feel his anger rising, staring at MJ in dismay.

“Pretty much.”

“Holy shit.” Steve takes a breath, trying to keep himself from reacting too strongly. “MJ, you know that’s not true, right?”

She pauses, thinking, and then shrugs. “Feels a little true,” she says, a self-deprecating smile on her lips, but she looks down at her lap.

Steve moves towards her, coming in closer, waiting for her to meet his eyes again. “I hope you told her to shut up.”

MJ laughs. “Oh, I said nothing and went and sat in the bathroom until I calmed down, and then we both pretended nothing happened, as we do.”

Steve sighs a little. That might be what he dislikes the most about Mrs. Gardner—the way MJ is around her. MJ is so strong, so willful and fiery, doesn’t take anyone’s shit. He has always admired that about her, from the day he met her, and only gained respect for it over the years. She’s a firecracker. And yet, when her mom is around, she just grins and bares whatever digs are thrown her way, rarely fighting back (and when she does, it’s half-hearted at best). It’s always hard to watch, like his wife has been replaced by this weaker, vaguely sadder woman, and he finds himself wishing he could speak up and protect her, even though he knows it’s not his place.

“I wish you’d stand up for yourself with her,” he says quietly, knowing he’s on shaky ground. This is such a sensitive subject for MJ, one with deep wounds, ones he knows about and ones he doesn’t. 

“It’s just not worth it,” she answers. “Trust me, I know her, it’s so much better not to fight back.” There’s nothing he can say to that. She climbs under the covers, burying herself, before continuing. “I probably shouldn’t really be talking about this. Gotta get the stress levels down.”

Steve frowns. “I don’t really think that keeping your feelings bottled up is what they meant by that.” 

“Fair point.” She sighs, picking at the skin on her hands under the blanket. “But honestly, it was good. I think she… I don’t know, she seemed guilty after she said that. Like she knew it wasn’t fair. Or at least wasn’t fair to say out loud. After that, it was nice. We watched TV and it was actually kind of fun. She kept complaining that the girls on TV don’t wear enough clothes. Calling them slutty.” 

Steve laughs. “Of course she did.”

MJ thinks again, not quite sure if she should say this next part out loud. “I don’t want to jinx it, but it… kind of feels like things might be getting better. Like she’s getting better. I feel like I could fix things.”

Steve nods at her, though he doesn’t think she’s the one who should be doing the fixing. “That would be nice.”

“It really would be. Especially with… well, I want our kids to have a relationship with her, right? I mean, I can’t imagine they’ll be meeting my father any time soon, and I’d love to give them at least one okay grandparent. Your parents will be wonderful, of course, but mine… I want to be a family.”

“Of course,” Steve says, climbing into bed next to her and kissing her on the cheek. “I’m glad things are getting better.”

“Me too.” They both reach up and turn out the lights, snuggling together under the covers.

“Goodnight, honey.”

“Goodnight, Steve.”

Her words hang in the air as silence takes over, Steve playing them over and over again in his mind. She wants to be a family. It’s something he’ll never be able to understand, he knows. Not that his parents are perfect, by any means, but to grow up like MJ, with a father who barely existed after her 13th birthday (Steve has never met him, he didn’t even come to the wedding, though she does get birthday and Christmas cards) and a mother who made her feel like a complete failure all the time... It dawns on him suddenly that having children is important to MJ for so many reasons he can’t relate to: the chance to be the mother she so desperately wished she had. One who was endlessly proud of her kids, encouraged them to achieve the most amazing things, protected them from anything that could hurt them. A family. 

He knows she’ll get that one day, and he hopes it’s soon. More than anything, he wants to see her become that mom. He wants her to have a family too.


	12. August 2001

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On a hot night in August, everything changes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have once again been slacking i know. but here!

On the last day of her first trimester, Steve comes home from work with a cake. 

He considers having something written on it, some kind of congratulatory message, but that seems a bit much, so he settles for a little chocolate cheesecake. “Not as good as the ones you make, but we need something to celebrate this.”

Carolyn had left two days earlier, after a check-up with MJ’s OB/GYN during which she was told, thankfully, that she could go off complete bedrest and start doing some light housework, light activity. She was still to stay off work, but she no longer had to spend the entire day on the couch. And as much as things had been pretty great with her mom the past few weeks—MJ had started watching General Hospital with her out of kindness, and by the end of her stay had gotten so invested that she keeps watching even on her own—neither of them are dying to extend the stay. So they say a warm goodbye, and Carolyn promises her daughter she’ll be back soon for a baby shower.

She spends much of her second trimester home, alone, while Steve works all day, but now that she’s allowed a little more activity, it’s actually quite wonderful. She gets back into her baking groove, which she gets really good at doing sitting down, and she starts eating cake for lunch. She figures she’s pregnant—when else is she going to be able to get away with that? She’d expected to find the endless time at home boring, but by the third week she realizes it’s amazing. She jokes to Steve that she might just stay pregnant forever so she can keep living like this, but deep down she really is dreading the idea that she’ll have to go back to having a job one day. Her house is spotless, she’s reading for fun again, and god the cakes she’s making are pretty. She feels the impact in other ways too. That constant drowning sensation has lessened ever so slightly. For so long, she’s felt like her breaking point was just looming over her, as if one more thing would push her over the edge. Now, she feels it getting a little bit farther away, feels a little more at peace. Thank goodness.

A cheesecake marks the end of the first trimester, and then the shower for the second. MJ’s mom and sisters come to Chicago to throw her one. It’s one of the best days of her life, an important milestone in ways that no one except Steve and her and her mother understand. She’s so tired from all the excitement and activity that she barely makes it to the end of the party, but Steve still can’t help but notice it’s the happiest he’s seen her in months. She falls asleep at 7 o’clock that night, Steve chuckling at the image of his wife passed out on the couch, still fully dressed, like an exhausted puppy after a day at the beach, as he gently tries to wake her and get her into bed.

He watches her climb under the covers and fall right back asleep within seconds, and then he sits there a bit longer, looking at her. They’ve finally made it here. She’s almost smiling, even in her sleep, and he can’t get enough of how happy she looks lately. He could watch her like this for hours, taking in the silhouette of her belly under the sheets, the blushing glow on her rounded cheeks. This is pure joy.

\--

In the early months of her pregnancy, MJ had been so attuned to every single little twinge, cramp, sensation in her body. Any hint of pain and she’d stop breathing momentarily, pausing to assess the feeling, until she was confident it had passed and everything was okay again. By the first few weeks of the third trimester, that was all over. She probably would have been more surprised by a single second without any discomfort. It’s always something different, and her OB/GYN is constantly assuring her that, while it’s good for her to be alert, she should expect to constantly be feeling some new symptom—heartburn, muscle cramps, whatever her body decides to throw at her at any given moment. 

And besides, as exhausting as it is, she does allow this last trimester to feel safe. Yes, she feels heavy and winded and sore and constantly exhausted, but she also feels like this might actually be real this time. She’s finally starting to let herself accept that this is happening—she’s going to become a mom. They’ve turned the study into a nursery and everything. She just has to get through these last few weeks.

She’s due in the middle of September, and July and August are made all the worse by the difficult summer heat, which has MJ feeling even more disgusting, heavy and sweaty than she had before. So on the evening of August 25, when she starts to develop a serious stomach ache and feel a little lightheaded, she doesn’t think too much of it. That's the nature of being eight months pregnant. She’s sitting on the back porch with Steve when she decides it’s time for her to call it a day—sleep will end her discomfort until morning, and she’s ready to be put out of her misery. 

“Time for bed?” Steve asks, seeing her start to stand. She rubs her belly, frowning a little. 

“Yeah.” Her back twinges with pain, not unusual for her these days, but it seems a little sharper than usual. She needs to get to sleep. “Goodnight honey.” 

He stands to kiss her goodnight, and follows her into the living room, watching her head to bed as he takes a seat on the couch with his book. He could sleep, but he knows MJ has been finding it hard to fall asleep with someone else’s body heat in bed with her, she’s just so overheated all the time. He figures he can let her go to sleep on her own and then join her once she has drifted off. 

And she is out pretty fast, which he knows as soon as he walks through their bedroom door half an hour later and hears her snoring loudly, something she has developed over the past few months. He smiles to himself before climbing into bed with her, kissing her forehead so gently that his lips don’t actually touch her skin, not risking waking her. He falls asleep to the sound of her snoring, his last thought being that he hopes that this particular newfound sleep habit of hers will be gone after she has the baby.

—

The shooting pain that overwhelms her body when she awakens in the pitch dark is like nothing she has ever experienced before. It’s as if she’s being ripped open, through her stomach, or her back, she doesn’t know where it’s coming from, just that she can’t breathe through it and she must be dying. She hears herself scream involuntarily, and it’s only when Steve frantically turns on a light that she realizes she’s covered in blood, their sheets soaked red. Steve gasps, and instantly MJ's vision starts to blur. He’s talking to her, she knows, but she can’t hear what he’s saying and oh my god it hurts. 

Her voice returns to her, though she still is having trouble seeing, but any ability to think or process what is happening has left her, and all she can do is whimper “it hurts” over and over again to Steve. She realizes he’s calling 911, and he's explaining that she's eight months pregnant and no, there's no way this is just labour and no he can't tell if her water has broken because she's bleeding too much, and even though she’s sitting down she thinks she might be passing out. There are a few seconds of darkness, and then Steve’s arms are around her and he’s stroking her hair, his eyes wide with fear. Her eyes are fluttering closed again, and he shakes her a little, thinking it’s probably best to keep her conscious. 

“Steve,” she moans, desperately trying to understand what’s happening, what this level of excruciating pain could possibly mean. She can't make sense of it, but clearly something terrible is happening to her. Suddenly, without warning, she starts to sob, an uncontrollable panicked cry, everything hitting her despite her lack of understanding—all she can think is that she must be dying. It's like nothing Steve has ever seen before. He holds her tighter, scared out of his mind.

“The ambulance will be here soon, honey, and it’s gonna be alright, okay?” She sobs louder. “They’re gonna make sure you’re okay, and the baby’s okay, and everything’s gonna be fine.” He doesn’t believe himself at all, but she’s so far gone, and he just wants to calm her down however he can. 

It’s not working, and she suddenly screams again, her entire body wracked with a fresh wave of sharp pain. As it passes, she realizes with alarm she needs to be sick, and she can’t quite move. “Steve, I’m-“, she starts, and he seems to read her cues and leaps up to grab something for her. He isn’t fast enough, and she's trying to get off the bed but she can't—she leans forward and throws up on the sheet in front of her, her face painted with shock and fear and disgust. He manages to get her the garbage can, but she's so out of it, so he holds it for her, whispering reassurances to her as she vomits violently once more. He knows enough to realize she's gone into shock. She's deathly pale and drenched with sweat and looks like she might pass out again.

“You’re okay, I know it hurts but it’s going to be okay, we’re going to get you to the hospital.” She continues to cry, but she seems to be done throwing up, so he puts down the garbage can and takes the soiled sheet away from her to at least help her feel a little bit cleaner. When he turns back to her, her eyes are sliding closed again. He grabs her, just a bit more roughly than he means to, and her eyes snap open. “I’m sorry, I know you want to go to sleep, but I need you to stay with me, Mary Jane.” He finally hears sirens—thank god. 

“I’m going to go unlock the door,” he says reassuringly, rushing away and hearing no response. The next few moments are a blur; Steve guides the paramedics to their bedroom, watches as they take MJ into the ambulance, and desperately wishes he knew what to do or say to her. Finally, he is sitting next to her as they rush to the hospital, and they’ve given her something for the pain, so she’s at least a little bit calmer. He's scared shitless, and the look in her eyes is making him want to cry. But he doesn't. He holds her hand in his, stroking it with his thumb, whispering reassurances to her that neither of them believe. “You’re okay, they’re going to make sure you’re okay, everything’s going to be fine.” She nods delicately, and he realizes he hasn't even mentioned the baby. It seems like too much to hope for, maybe, that the baby will make it through whatever the hell is happening right now—and he's just so fucking terrified for MJ. He has never seen another person this sick, in this much pain, in his life, and it's giving him a weird perspective. Losing the baby would break them, but if he loses her...

MJ's eyes are closed again, so he squeezes her hand, and he feels her squeeze his back, her eyes still closed, letting him know she's awake. It hurts less now, but a part of her still just wants to pass out again and stop experiencing this. And then another part of her feels like if she passes out, she might never wake up.

The scariest part of all is how calm she's starting to feel, like a blind acceptance of her imminent future. She still believes, in a huge and horrifying way, that she may currently be living through her last few moments. She's not sure why—she just can feel it in the air, the severity of what is happening to her. But she's oddly calm now, squeezing Steve's hand to try and reassure him she's still here, and she's gonna do whatever she can to hang on. Mostly for him.

She just hopes that whatever happens to her, her baby is okay.


	13. August 26, 2001

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The most important night of their lives so far.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i actually uploaded a chapter on the scheduled day i'm supposed to upload a chapter (applause)

They’ve barely even brought her in before the OB/GYN is telling Steve, and a very sleepy, slightly out-of-it MJ, that he believes she’s experiencing a placental abruption. They’re 98% sure that’s what’s going on, and regardless, even if that’s not it, they need to get things moving before she and the baby lose any more blood. She’s in her 36th week, so the risk of delivering now is relatively minimal. The baby should be fine. As long as they get moving.

Things don’t feel fine, though. The pain is starting to increase again, and MJ is just counting down the seconds until they put her under so she can finally be asleep. She can’t take this pain anymore. It’s almost a bit of a blessing—she doesn’t quite have the mental wherewithal to process what’s happening, that she’s about to deliver a baby, that she’ll be asleep for her first child’s birth, that they’re already preparing to give her a blood transfusion because she’s becoming weaker and weaker. All she can focus on is how ready she is for this to end.

Steve, meanwhile, is all too aware of what’s going on. He’s doing enough processing for both of them. He’s not sure if MJ takes in what they’re saying about how they urgently need to get her to stop bleeding, but he sure does, and he squeezes her hand tighter, no idea if it’s to comfort her or himself. And then a midwife turns to Steve directly, looking at him with sympathy as she gently breaks the news to him.

“Since she’ll be under general anesthesia, you won’t be able to be in the room,” she explains. He should have realized that on his own, he thinks to himself, but it somehow didn’t occur to him until now. He won’t be there when their baby is born. Neither will MJ, really, since she’ll be asleep. They’ll both miss the biggest moment of their lives so far. And he won’t be able to hold her hand, make sure she’s safe and comfortable (he knows, of course, that’s out of his control anyways, but he just would feel better if he could be by her side). He nods in response, looking down at her, her hand still in his. “You’ll wait right outside, and we’ll bring your little one right out to you once they’re out, and then mommy will join you soon after, okay?”

“Okay,” Steve answers, like he has a choice. Even in her exhausted state, MJ registers that she’s just been called “mommy.” She’s always hated when people did that throughout her pregnancy, finding it a little preemptive, but suddenly it’s realer than ever. Someone else pops out of the room, nodding to the midwife, and she turns to them one last time. 

“Alright, we’re ready to go, so lets say a temporary goodbye, hm?” 

She makes it sound so easy, and it’s one of the hardest things Steve has ever had to do. He crouches down, making himself level with MJ as she lies in the bed, and reaches up to stroke her hair. She’s so pale, so visibly exhausted, her body still shaking from shock and pain. She gives him the biggest smile she can, desperate to reassure him.

“Bye, sweetheart. I love you so much,” he whispers. He knows she won’t want him to be dramatic—but maybe the situation merits it.

“I’ll see you soon, Steve,” she replies. He stands up again, before bending down to kiss her forehead. 

“I love you,” he says again, as if he forgot he already did, and then places another kiss on her stomach. “And I love you too, and I can’t wait to meet you.” There’s something under his words, a fear that MJ can read under everything he says.

“We’re going to be just fine,” she reassures him. “I’ll see you later.”

“I know,” he says, even though he doesn’t. And then he watches as they wheel his wife into the room, closing the door behind them. She’s out of sight, and yet he stands there for another few minutes, just watching the closed door. She feels worlds away from him, and at some point he realizes he’s crying. Finally, he takes a seat on a nearby seat, and waits. And waits. It crosses his mind that they didn’t pack anything—no clothes for MJ, none of the stuff you’re supposed to bring—and he doesn’t even have the car with him, so he can’t go get it. He waits some more. He paces a little bit, and God he’d kill for a coffee, but he doesn’t want to go more than a few steps from the door. He has to be here. 

He has no idea how much time passes. It feels like hours, and yet also like it may have only been a few minutes. At one point it occurs to him to call his parents, which he does, and then he promptly bursts into tears on the phone with his mom as he explains that he’s not sure exactly what’s happening, but MJ’s having the baby. He even has the presence of mind to ask her to stop by his place tomorrow to clean up their bedroom, deal with the mess of the night’s events, and his mom promises she’ll come by the hospital as soon as MJ is comfortable with visitors. Then he waits again, and waits some more. Finally, the door opens, and Steve sees the midwife from earlier appear. For half a second, he doesn’t even see the baby. 

And then he does.

“It’s a boy,” she smiles, and Steve can’t breathe, can’t think, can just see the baby, his baby, and he starts to cry again. “Are you ready to say hi to daddy?” The midwife coos, bouncing Steve’s son ever so slightly before placing him gently, so gently, into his arms. He looks down at him, completely overwhelmed, beyond words. He just can’t believe it.

“Hi baby,” he whispers tearily. They don’t have names picked out, or anything, so he’s just “baby” for now, until he and MJ can pick one together. He’s almost distracted enough by the indescribable love he feels right now to forget that he’s still separated from her, but then it hits him again after a few seconds, and he looks up at the woman in front of him, who has her eyes glued to the baby in his arms. “How is she?”

The midwife takes a bit of a breath before speaking, which makes Steve's heart pound. “They’re still trying to get the bleeding under control. They’re having some issues with that. But they’re giving her more blood, and there are a number of things they can try before resorting to more serious measures.” He wants to ask what more serious measures means, but he can’t quite bring himself to.

“But she’s going to be okay?” He asks quietly, some part of him not wanting the baby to hear this conversation, despite how stupid that sounds. He rocks him in his arms, trying to be as infinitely gentle as he can. It almost hurts him to look away from the little face in his arms, but he’s also terribly worried about MJ.

“She’s hanging in there. She has lost quite a lot of blood, and there is always a risk, but everything should be fine soon.” She gives him a reassuring pat on the arm. “Now, we’d love to get you and baby settled in to her room, so you two can wait for her there, okay?” 

Steve nods, his gaze once again fixed on the child in his arms, not able to pull his eyes away. He doesn’t even realize the midwife is looking at him expectantly until she speaks up.

“We’re going to put him in the bassinet to bring him to the room,” she says, pulling Steve back to reality. He passes his baby back to her, the separation feeling devastating, and then walks alongside her and another nurse as they make their way to the room. He’s glued to the side of the bassinet, eyes not looking up for a moment, following blindly. It suddenly occurs to him that the baby hasn’t cried at all. He smiles to himself. At least one of them is feeling brave.

They get to the room, and Steve takes a seat on the armchair beside MJ’s bed, or what will be MJ’s bed, and they pass the baby to him yet again. Reunited. He’s oblivious to the nurse and the midwife that bustle around the room, feeling alone in the world with his son. He starts taking stock of each little part of him. His eyes are blue, like MJ’s. He had hoped their kids would look like her, be as beautiful as her. His son makes a little noise, a little gurgle, and Steve feels like his heart is literally melting. His face is starting to hurt from how widely he’s grinning. 

The minutes continue to pass, however, and the anxiety starts to set in again. He needs to see her, needs to know she’s okay. He doesn’t want to put the baby down, but he’s starting to feel an overwhelming stress again, and before he knows it the baby starts to cry. Probably picking up on his worry, he thinks to himself. Of course, for the first time, no one else in the room. It’s just the two of them. And he has no idea what to do.

“Shhhh,” he whispers, giving him a little bounce. “We just have to wait a little bit longer for mommy, okay? She’s going to be here very soon.” He steals a glance at the clock—nearly 5 am. It’s been twenty five minutes since they got to this room. He really does hope she’ll be here soon. The longer she spends in surgery, the more terrified he becomes. 

The crying gets a little bit louder, and Steve reaches his hand out and tickles the palms of his baby’s hands. It’s almost like what he does with MJ, when she’s upset, tries to soothe her with his touch. It’s a strange comparison, yet oddly fitting. She’s been the center of his universe for so long, and now she’s not here, but his universe has shifted, and he’s holding their son in his arms. He can’t wait for her to meet him, to get to hold him, to see her hold this perfect child they created together. He reaches one hand and wipes the tears from his own cheeks.

“Great, now we’re all crying,” he laughs. With that, his son goes quiet, looking up at him, eyes huge. Like MJ’s. “We’ll meet mommy any minute now, okay? She’s going to be so excited to see you. You’re very lucky, you know. A very lucky kid, to have her. Your mom is the strongest, bravest person I know.” He’s not sure why he’s saying all this, but something has to fill the silence, and his thoughts are so confusing right now. “We have waited a very long time for you.” 

Time passes in a weird limbo, and still no MJ. Surely she must be okay, right? The baby is asleep now, and Steve moves to place him back in the bassinet. He wishes they’d picked a name so he would have something to call him other than “baby.” He bends over to kiss him goodnight, before settling back into his chair. The exhaustion is starting to hit him hard, a debilitating combination of the lack of sleep and the wild roller coaster that the past few hours have taken them on. Before he knows it, he has drifted off. 

He’s not sure why he wakes up when he does—almost as if he sensed she was coming. The room is still silent, door still closed, baby still sleeping. He realizes the sun is starting to rise, and then glances up at the clock. Just past 6:30 AM. Then he sees movement in the glass pane of the door, and it opens slowly.

The OB/GYN from earlier appears in the room, and no MJ. Steve’s stomach drops, her absence starting to make him dizzy. Where is she? Why isn’t she here yet? 

“Mrs. Healy is alright,” the doctor tells him immediately, clearly sensing the overwhelming worry. “She’ll be here in a moment. But there are some things to discuss.”

Oh. Steve doesn’t quite like the sound of that. 

“Okay.” He stands up from his chair, the exhaustion that had settled in his bones replaced with a new burst of adrenaline. 

“We had a great deal of difficulty stopping the bleeding, and we made the difficult decision to perform an emergency hysterectomy. That’s not something we take lightly, but in this case it was truly the necessary thing to do to save her life. This does mean her recovery will likely be a little bit more difficult. And, of course, she won’t be able to get pregnant again. But she’s doing very well now, and I’ve been told the baby is too.” Steve nods, taking a quick glance at his sleeping child behind him. “Congratulations, Mr. Healy. I’ll be in periodically to check on your wife over the next few days.” With that, he turns to leave, and Steve is once again left standing awkwardly on his own. He’d said MJ would be here soon. What does soon mean at this point? The passage of time is all over the place.

Then the door swings open again, and suddenly there she is. Indescribable relief washes over him as they wheel her in, on a bed, and he sees that she’s awake. The tiniest smile comes to her lips when she sees him.

“Hi honey,” he greets her. The smile on her face grows a bit.

“Hi,” she croaks, her throat dry and sore from the anesthesia. The process of getting her off one bed and onto the other is arduous, and she gasps in pain as they move her. But once she’s settled there, all she can think about is the baby. Steve is one step ahead of her, wheeling the little bassinet slowly over to the side of her bed.

“Oh my god,” she gasps, taking in the sight of her child as he comes into view. “Oh my god.”

“We’ve been waiting for you,” Steve says, grinning. “He was very anxious to meet you.”

“Oh my god,” she whispers once again, as if unable to say anything else. She wants to hold him so badly she thinks she might explode, but she’s not sure if she should wake him, and it’s killing her.

“We can have you hold him,” a nurse speaks up, as if reading her mind. “It’s okay if he’s sleeping, he needs skin to skin contact with you. It will probably hurt, though.” 

MJ nods—she doesn’t care how badly it will hurt, she’s never needed anything more than she needs to hold her baby. Steve slowly lifts him out of the bassinet as the nurse makes sure MJ is seated in the ideal position, and then he lays him into his mother’s arms.

His eyes blink awake as MJ smiles down at him, looking up at her intently. “Oh, good morning angel,” she whispers. She’s so in love she could burst. She’s vaguely aware of how much pain she’s in, but it’s as if that exists elsewhere. Here there is only her baby boy. 

“He has blue eyes, like you,” Steve tells her, as if she can’t see for herself.

“Don’t all babies have blue eyes?”

“I thought that was a myth.”

“Oh.” She can’t look away from him even for a second, trying to absorb each and every inch of him. Each fingernail, each tiny strand of hair. Their son. 

Steve places a hand lightly on MJ’s back, wanting so badly to hug her and yet knowing she’s still in pain. A hand on her back will have to do. They watch the baby in awe, finally able to take him in together. The three of them. A family.

“Look what we did,” Steve murmurs. “Look what you did.”

“He’s so perfect,” she responds. “I mean, thank goodness, since I’ve been told he’s my last one.”

Steve runs his hand up and down her back, not sure if she really is taking that well, or if she’s just pretending to, or if maybe she just hasn’t processed it yet in the midst of this overwhelming joy. “Well, I think you nailed it,” he laughs.

“Really? I think I could have done without the almost-bleeding-out part, personally.”

Steve laughs again. “Well, you’re here, and he’s here. We’re all here. I think we’re doing pretty damn good.”

She nods, placing her finger in the center of the baby’s palm, comparing the sizes, feeling his perfect skin. They are all here. Her, and her husband, and her son. Her child. They really are parents—it’s not just a dream. She’s a mom now.

Pretty damn good indeed.


	14. The days after

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MJ and Steve break the news, pick a name, and make a big decision.

MJ knows she needs to call her mom, but there’s just so much to do. Steve managed to find a second to sneak out and catch his parents up on the past few hours, but MJ hasn’t had the chance yet—it’s a surprisingly busy ordeal, the first hours of the morning after. She tries to breastfeed twice, she answers a million questions from nurses and is given more morphine, she falls asleep off and on for thirty minute intervals, and most importantly, when she’s awake, she just can’t pry her eyes away from her baby for more than three seconds. At quarter to noon, she’s just nodding off again when she suddenly jolts awake.

“What?” Steve asks, seeing her eyes snap open, ready to leap up for her if she needs anything.

“I still haven’t called my mom. God,” she sighs. Steve stands, pushing the little nightstand with the phone on it towards her bed so it’s within her reach. He settles back into his armchair, bassinet next to him, where he’s spent the past half hour waving his fingers high above the baby’s face and watching his eyes light up. (They still haven’t picked a name, so he is still “the baby.” MJ says her brain isn’t quite working enough for that yet, and they can talk about it once she’s slept some more). 

She punches in the number, trying not to think too much about the fact that this is one of the most important, and craziest, conversations she has ever had. She feels weirdly calm about everything, strangely relaxed. Probably the drugs they have her on.

“Hello?” She hears on the other end. She looks to Steve, who pulls his eyes away from the bassinet, needing his support even from across the room.

“Hi, mom.”

“Oh, Mary Jane! I wasn’t expect- is everything alright? Are you okay?” MJ takes a bit of a breath, smiling just a bit. 

“Yeah, everything’s… well. You’re a grandmother.”

The loudest gasp she has ever heard follows. “WHAT? You’re… you had…?” 

MJ can tell her mother is at a loss for words, and she chuckles quietly to herself, seeing Steve grin from across the room. “It’s a boy, 6 pounds 2 ounces, which is really big considering he’s a little premature. And he’s healthy and… he’s perfect, mom, I can’t even believe it.” 

Carolyn sighs audibly. “I’m going to come down as soon as I can, to see you three. My goodness. And how are you doing?”

That’s the tougher question. “Well, I’m okay, I guess. It was a bit of… an adventure. You almost lost me, but I toughed it out in the end.”

Steve rolls his eyes. It’s classic MJ, breaking the news of her near-death experience to her mother as if it were a weather report. It’s so hard to get her to actually reckon with the seriousness of something like this. But, he supposes, in this case it’s probably for the best—the last day’s events were so unbelievably traumatic, and yet it’s almost as if she’s barely registered it, ready to move on and accept the joy of the present. He wishes he were able to just forget the past few hours as easily as she seems to have.

“What do you mean?” Her mother asks cautiously. MJ grits her teeth a little.

“We had to deliver early because I had a placental abruption, which was pretty horrible. So they gave me an emergency C-Section, and that went fine but then there were more issues, and I’m basically fine now, but I don’t have a uterus anymore.” 

“My goodness.” It’s a lot to unpack in one quick sentence. MJ herself hasn’t even begun to process that last part. “Are you in a lot of pain?”

“Oh, it feels like they cut me open and took out one of my organs, yeah,” MJ laughs. “But they have me on good drugs.”

New questions keep popping into Carolyn’s head as she tries to process all the information being thrown at her. She doesn’t even know what to ask. “Do you have a name?”

MJ glances over at her son in his little clear bed. “No, I’ll get back to you on that one.” That really is getting pressing, and she has absolutely no idea where to start. She has had about 1000 ideas over the past few months, but they didn’t know the sex and she never quite narrowed it down to a list of top choices. “I just wanted to update you, but I need to get some sleep, so I’ll talk to you again soon, okay?”

“Congratulations, darling. I’m over the moon for you,” her mother says, stirring a little something unplaceable in MJ’s heart. “I will let you know how soon I’ll be in Chicago. Take care.”

“Bye, mom.” MJ places the receiver back down, sighing a little.

“The name?” Steve asks. She nods. 

“We need to… do that,” she responds.

Steve reaches his finger into the bassinet, touching the still nameless baby’s hand. “What are you thinking? I know you had ideas, before…” Before the terrfiying plot twist that was last night, he doesn’t say. MJ fiddles with the sheet in her hand. She did have ideas, but not serious ones. It was as if picking a name was the one step she couldn’t bring herself to take. She could have sold the crib, thrown out the baby stuff and the gifts, if something had ended up happening to this pregnancy too, but she couldn’t have undone the finality of picking a name. She couldn’t have handled losing a baby she’d really started seeing as a child, a person. So the ideas had always been fleeting thoughts she quickly pushed out of her mind.

She looks over at Steve, his hand still resting by their baby. “This might be kind of stupid, but… I don’t know, I was thinking, he was our little Christmas miracle. Like a present. So I was thinking-”

“We name him Jesus?”

MJ giggles. “I was thinking Nicholas. Like, Saint Nick.”

Steve lets out a breath, almost a little gasp. Like something clicked. He looks down, smiling at his son. “Oh, I love it.”

MJ beams. “Really?” Then her smile shrinks a little. “You’re not just saying that? You can be honest, it’s-”

“No, I really love it. ‘Nick.’” 

“We can sit on it for a bit, see how it feels. Maybe we’ll end up hating it.”

Steve nods. “Definitely. But I do love it.”

MJ smiles sheepishly. “I’m glad. I mean the reason behind it is a little lame, but…”

“We don’t have to tell people why we picked it. That can be just between us. Kind of special that way.”

She likes that. Just between them. Like so many other parts of this journey. Exactly how desperate they’d been to have this kid is something MJ can’t imagine telling anyone, and so she knows a lot of that story will always remain between her and her husband: the bloodshed, the late nights crying in bed together, the cheesecakes to celebrate just how monumental every tiny pregnancy milestone was. Just between them.

“Can you bring him over here again?” She asks, and Steve instantly stands and begins rolling the bassinet towards her bed.

“Do you want to hold him?” He already knows the answer, and when she nods, he slowly lifts Nick up and places him in his mother’s arms. She winces just a little, but adjusts to the feeling quickly. He feels like a part of her—like he fits perfectly in her arms, despite how tender and sore she still is.

“My son, Nicholas,” she whispers, and Steve looks at her. “Just practicing how I’m going to talk about him to other people. ‘Oh, you know my son, Nicholas.’”

Steve shakes his head in disbelief. “It’s crazy. Hearing you say that. Just… wow.” 

“I know, right?” The words feel delicious on her tongue: “My son.” And Steve is so enthralled hearing her say them, and watching her hold him so beautifully in her arms. Her hair is dirty, her face still a bit pale, her eyes a little bloodshot from exhaustion, and yet he can’t stop looking at her, at how she’s beaming with joy. Motherhood looks so good on her. He knew it would.

“Nick,” he says again, sitting very lightly on the edge of her bed, not wanting to move her at all. Nick turns to him when he says his name, wide eyes taking in both the people on the bed. 

“Look, he’s already answering to it. I think that’s a sign,” she laughs.

“I think he just likes me better than you,” Steve replies. MJ gives him a playful glare, before turning her attention back to Nick. 

“Who do you like better, mommy or daddy?” She smiles widely, eyes glinting and voice high-pitched and cheery. Steve gently swats at her arm.

“Enough. He can decide when he’s 15.” She laughs, and Nick’s smile grows. 

“Nick,” she whispers again. It really does seem right. And she just can’t believe he’s really here. Name and all. 

\---

The first few days at home are an emotional roller coaster. The minute they get back, something shifts in MJ. In the hospital, they existed in a weird limbo where nothing felt real anyways. Suddenly, she’s in her apartment, with a baby, and she can still barely walk, and it’s all a bit much. She’s uncontrollably weepy the first day home, which Steve finds very disconcerting. She was fine in the hospital, but now suddenly she just won’t stop crying, and she won’t tell him what’s wrong because she doesn’t know—it’s all just a lot. She wishes she could be upset in private, because she’s embarrassed. She should be over the moon right now, and instead she just can’t stop fucking crying. But movement is still so difficult, and she doesn’t quite have the energy to get herself to the bathroom to be alone when she feels another crying jag about to hit.

So Steve will just have to see her in all her messiness. He’ll watch as she goes from laughing with Nick, making little noises at him, to suddenly starting to lose it when the pain or the exhaustion hits, and he’ll wordlessly take the baby from her and hand her a Kleenex. He wishes he could hold her, like he used to, but now there’s a baby to hold instead, so he coos at him to make MJ feel a little less watched, knowing she’s embarrassed. Even though she shouldn’t be, which he does tell her, over and over again. “You’ve been through a crazy few days,” he whispers soothingly. “It’s a lot to handle.”

“I know,” she sniffles, the words not quite getting through. She wishes she wasn’t so damn teary all the time. She wants to be happy.

Then on the second day home, her mother arrives to stay with them, ready to help MJ out with the double-whammy of caring for a newborn and recovering from surgery. That puts an end to the open displays of emotion. Crying in front of her mother is an embarrassment she’s not quite ready for. 

When it rains, it pours. They’ve been home three days—after two in the hospital—when Steve comes to find MJ in the living room, nursing Nick, holding his cell phone ominously in his hand. Her eyes are closed, head tilted upwards and resting on the back of the couch. She’s still sore as hell, but the pain becomes a little more manageable with each passing day (though it helps that she has a month’s prescription of morphine, and hearty encouragement from the OB/GYN: “Don’t try and tough out the pain. Use it.”) Carolyn is in her makeshift bedroom—probably asleep. She somehow appears to be more exhausted than MJ, but that’s fine by her. MJ likes that her mother takes a lot of time to herself, gives her some space. She needs it.

“I have to talk to you about something totally insane,” Steve starts.

MJ opens her eyes, adjusting her hold on Nick. “Exciting intro. Go on.”

“I’ve been talking to these… people at a firm in New York. They want to, well, poach me.”

MJ looks at him incredulously. “Poach you?”

“After the Abernath case, I guess there was some buzz, I don’t know, but they’re offering me… a lot of money. Like, insane. To come work for them.” 

MJ thinks for a minute, looking down. “In New York City?”

“Yeah. I know it’s a LOT to think about right now, of all times, but…” He feels bad for springing this on her in the midst of everything.

“I’m certainly not against it. But it’s definitely a lot.”

“We have a few days to decide,” he says quietly. Oh. A few days?

“Jesus.”

“I know. I told them I was on paternity leave, but there’s a certain case they want me for. I can work on it remotely, we don’t have to move just yet, but… they need to know.”

She nods. “I love New York,” she says quietly. “I mean, I don’t know if I’d want to live in it, but… I do love that city.” She’s only been three times, all after she’d started dating Steve. It’s so different from the small, rural town she grew up in, and she finds the bustle exhilarating. But she has a baby now, and…

“We don’t have to live it in. We can get a really nice place in Jersey, or Connecticut. With a big yard. Much nicer than this place.”

She thinks for a moment. They do need to buy a home—it had been on their list of things to think about in the next few years. Especially if they were going to have more children, although apparently that option’s been taken off the table for her, but even so.

“I think you should take it,” she says suddenly. “That would be nice. A fresh start. As a family.”

Steve’s eyes light up. “Really? I mean, not that you have to decide right now, but-”

“It’s a good idea. I can find a new job there. Eventually.”

He sits down on the couch beside her, rubbing a hand on her shoulder. She lifts Nick off her chest, and wordlessly reaches out to pass him to Steve, who takes him gratefully, giving him a gentle rock. MJ breathes a sigh of relief, her body still screaming at her.

“Nick, what do you think? New York? Jersey? Connecticut?” Steve asks, and Nick lets out a little laugh, both parents melting a little at the sound. “Sounds like he’s all for it.”

“That’s a very scientific decision making method you’ve got there,” MJ remarks, a playful grin on her lips. Steve laughs, still enthralled by Nick’s smile. 

“My thoughts exactly.” 

MJ leans her head against Steve’s shoulder, closing her eyes for just a minute, a much needed short break. The plans can come later, but the more she thinks about it, the more she loves the idea of uprooting everything. She doesn’t quite feel like she’s trying to outrun the past anymore, not like she used to, but there is still something attractive to her about taking herself even further away from it. Finally leave Mary Jane Gardner behind for good. A brand new life, with people who have only ever known MJ Healy, Steve’s wife, Nick’s mom. 

That last one especially. She’s been so many things in her life, including things she’s desperately tried to forget, but none of them are as special as Nick’s mom. Maybe in this new life, she’ll finally leave behind all the other ones, and just have that. This is exactly what she needs.


	15. September 2001

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MJ deals with the aftermath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heyyyyyy hi everyone it's me again

She thought she’d be happy.

And in some ways, she thinks maybe she is. It’s just… hard to tell. She’s feeling so many things, all at once, and they're all becoming more and more difficult to tell apart. And heavier.

She has a baby. A perfect, beautiful baby, healthy and adorable and everything she could ever have asked for. She tells herself, over and over again, that she needs to be more appreciative of that fact, as she lies awake in bed night after night (she hasn’t slept more than an hour a night since August 26, not only because of a baby who wakes at all hours but also the bonus of a debilitating insomnia she’s developed for God knows what reason). After years of begging to just please, please let one of her babies make it, one did, and she loves him in a way that is all-consuming and indescribable. 

And yet. She cannot shake the grief of what was lost on the day Nick was born. She feels guilty for fixating on that—she had a baby that day, for Christ’s sake, and that should be her focus, that should be enough. But she lost something so huge, so fundamental to how she saw herself as well. She hasn’t said a word about these feelings to Steve. She doesn’t know how. But she feels somehow empty, somehow shattered. For years, the nagging voice in her head that likes to remind her how pathetic she is has been trying to convince her she’s a failure as a woman, as a wife, because of how difficult pregnancy was for her—and now it’s no longer something she’s even capable of on a basic level. She’s 27, and she’s completely infertile. She can’t bear children.

She’s sure she’s hallucinating the empty feeling in her stomach, the one that feels most intense at night, when she lies in the quiet dark and can’t fall asleep no matter how exhausted she is, but she’s aware of it nonetheless. A part of her is gone. It doesn’t help, of course, that she’s still tremendously sore from surgery, because she is constantly aware of the pain in her abdomen. The pain of what was ripped away from her.

Steve, for his part, is… busy. He’s trying to power through, as hard as it is, and not get too heartbroken over what he’s currently missing. He accepted the new job, and has already had to take on a caseload, despite making it clear to them that his wife had just had a baby. But the money is so, so good, and it’s hard for him not to think about how much MJ and Nick deserve that. Especially since he feels a little… useless. Mostly in comparison to MJ. He's just in awe of her. The bravery with which she faced surgery, the strength with which she's handling recovery, the way she seems to be accepting the unfortunate complications of Nick’s birth—and all while nursing, getting so little sleep, and still gritting her teeth through extraordinary physical pain. She's had her little crying spells, and he can definitely see the stress that is sometimes bubbling under the surface, but other than those little moments she's astoundingly strong. He cannot believe how brave she is.

(Bravery is certainly not the word she'd use for it.)

So MJ says nothing to Steve, doesn’t tell him how crushing the weight is on her heart, doesn’t tell him that she feels scared and upset and completely worthless. She just smiles, and tries to get herself somewhere private whenever she needs to cry. He was so sure she’d be a perfect mom—she doesn’t want him to realize he was wrong in the first month. And he’s so distracted by work, and by baby Nick, that she’s able to hide her strange depression almost completely. Just the way she likes it.

\--

Her mother turns out to be a different story. There are certainly benefits to having her here, especially since Steve is a little busy, and she’s an extra set of hands to help with Nick. But she’s also another stressor to add to MJ’s very long list, and her presence can be a bit exhausting. It certainly is today, as MJ sits in the living room with a very fussy Nick in her arms. He’s been wailing for hours, and she knows he’s hungry but he doesn’t seem to want to latch onto her, which has never been this much of an issue before, but apparently it is now and she’s becoming very, very frustrated. And apparently Nick is too.

“He’s just hungry,” her mom says unhelpfully, seated opposite her. MJ barely manages to conceal her eyeroll.

“I know, mom.” The endless crying is started to get to her somewhere deep in her chest. Nick’s cries always hurt her, launch her into some new maternal mode she’s discovered where she can handle any physical pain in order to make sure he’s comfortable and happy again. But today she’s been listening to it for hours, and the sound is making it difficult to breathe. She needs to do something, needs to calm him down. She tries the bottle, instead, but he doesn’t really seem to be interested in that either.

“Let me try for a bit,” Carolyn says, and anger bubbles up in MJ’s stomach, resenting the implication that her mother will somehow know how to calm down her son better than her. But she’s on her last straw, desperately needing him calmed, and it’s been hours since he’s eaten and he’s upset and she’s rapidly descending into a really bad state, so she steels herself and turns to her mother.

“Okay,” she whispers, and Carolyn picks up the bottle from the coffee table and moves towards MJ to take Nick from her, and MJ hands him off, breathing a tiny sigh of relief as the weight leaves her arms and her chest—her body is screaming at her in pain. She watches as her mother holds him, looking so natural, so well-practiced, and suddenly he’s quiet, and he’s drinking from the bottle. It shouldn’t hurt as much as it does—her mother raised four babies, and she should be grateful for the help, and grateful that his son is bonding well with his grandmother, but she feels the familiar emotion rising through her throat and hopelessly tries to swallow it down.

“You get better at it with time,” Carolyn explains, looking down at Nick in her arms as he feeds from the bottle. “I didn’t know what I was doing when your brother was born. You were easier, and then your sisters were a walk in the park. It just takes getting used to.”

MJ blinks, wondering if this woman hears herself when she speaks, if she has any idea what she just said to her. But she must: she easily could have left it at “it gets easier with time” without reminding MJ that she had had four children and MJ wouldn’t be having any more. And still she watches as Nick lies peacefully in his grandmother’s arms, happily feeding from her after hours of crying. She can’t take it, the constant feeling of absolute devastating failure boiling over, and she needs to get herself some privacy because the tears are coming, and fast. 

She starts to stand, and she’s halfway up when a sharp pain shoots through her stomach, the kind that randomly attacks her every once in a while, and she gasps as the sensation knocks her right back down, collapsing back against the couch, breathless. It’s gone as soon as it came, but she sits frozen on the couch as she starts to cry, silently but intensely.

“Mary Jane?” Her mother asks, alarmed. MJ sobs. “Are you okay?”

“No,” she gasps, just trying to breathe. Her mother looks scared, certainly worried something has happened or she’s hurt or needs help. 

“What’s the matter?”

Nothing is, she knows, and yet she’s crying more and more loudly as the situation overwhelms her. “Nothing, I just… I can’t…” She gasps for air as the tears continue to stream.

Her mother is staring at her, still holding the baby but all her attention focused on MJ, unsure of what to do. She doesn’t seem to be in pain, or at least not more than usual, but Carolyn has rarely, if ever, seen her cry like this, and it’s only growing more and more desperate. MJ wonders if maybe she’ll come over to her, make any vague attempt at comforting her, but instead her mother just sits across from her with something like sympathy on her face. But after a moment, when MJ still has not started to calm down, the sympathetic look fades.

“Okay, Mary Jane, pull it together,” Carolyn scolds. MJ blinks. “You’re being dramatic.” 

She knows she is, and yet she senses herself spiralling further into this pit of sadness and anxiety, and she doesn’t know how to pull herself out.

“I’m sorry,” she sobs. Carolyn looks away from her again, diverting her gaze back to the baby and rocking him a little. He’s still quiet. 

“He can sense when you’re upset, you know,” she says quietly. “It’s probably why he didn’t want to feed,” and MJ suddenly needs to get out of this room right this second. She pushes herself off the couch with her arms, bracing for the pain of movement, and then starts towards the bathroom.

She manages to make it to the bathroom and get the door closed, and lower herself down to sit on the closed toilet seat, before her heart rate suddenly picks up and a wave of overpowering fear washes over her. Is the room spinning? She can't seem to breathe.

She doesn't know why she's so scared all of a sudden, but terror has gripped her from the inside and she starts to shake uncontrollably, trying to steady herself but instead hyperventilating more and more intensely. Her vision is blurring and something is buzzing in her ears, and she can barely remember where she is, not helped by the fact that she can now barely see. What the fuck is wrong with her?

This has happened to her on numerous occasions (she knows they're panic attacks, but to really call them that would be to admit their severity, so she just avoids thinking of them in those terms), but she's not sure it's ever been this severe, she notes as she struggles to keep herself upright while her body shakes violently. Somewhere in the back of her mind she remembers her OB/GYN telling her that “women with anxiety disorders may find them heightened during pregnancy.” She convinced herself to brush it off, and now here she is, no longer pregnant and having the worst anxiety attack she's had in years. She feels faint, and sick to her stomach, starting to worry she may actually throw up or pass out or both. 

“Women with anxiety disorders.” Was that really her? What if there really was something wrong with her—a thought she's had many times, that something might not be quite right, but that was before. Now she has a child to care for, and she needs to be okay for him. What if her mother hadn't been holding him right now? What if she has another panic attack while she's holding Nick? What if she hurts him, or loses control, and if there really is something wrong with her brain then is she fit to raise a child? Can they take him away from her?

She can't get any air into her lungs, and she's going to pass out. She grips the wall intensely, trying to feel something in her hand, but her vision is almost going dark as she tries to breathe, scared beyond words. Surely she’s about to die. She's going to die right here in the bathroom with her infant son in the next room. She needs help, needs someone to come find her. She needs her mom. 

Her usual awareness of the embarrassment of this situation is gone, and she just wants her mom to come be here, come keep her alive, come make sure she’s breathing, so she calls out. 

“Mom?” It comes out no louder than a whisper, and she tries again. It's like she can't remember how to speak, even though she's trying to yell, wants to scream for help. “Mom, please,” she whimpers, but she knows there’s no way she hears it through the closed door and over the sound of the baby crying-

Oh. Nick is crying. The sound jolts her a step back towards reality. She closes her eyes, hearing the familiar noise, the painful sound of her son's cries. He's out there, upset. Maybe because he wants his mom. As unsettling as it normally is to hear, the sound grounds her a little bit. That's her child, and he needs her. Okay.

She takes a deep breath, the air finally getting into her lungs, relieving the firm pressure in her chest. Her vision begins to clear, and she pushes herself into a standing position and moves to the sink to splash some cold water on her face. She can't pull this shit anymore. She can't have these little episodes—she needs to be able to put aside her own feelings and focus on her kid’s. He's what's important now.

She dries her face in a hand towel, taking a few more breaths before feeling more ready to emerge. Finally, she heads back to the living room.

Carolyn is seated on the couch now, crying baby in her arms, cradling him.

“You're back,” she observes. MJ looks at her, confirming with certainty that her mother has no clue what just happened, no clue she was just hyperventilating in the bathroom begging for her to come help her, protect her. “Have you calmed down a bit?”

MJ nods gently. Just a hint of shame. 

“Yeah, I'm fine. Let me hold him.”

\--

“Honey, why don’t you go to bed.”

Steve’s voice startles her out of her thoughts, and she realizes she’d been staring blankly at the wall. He’s looking at her, a touch of concern in his eyes. She takes a quick glance at the clock above the door. It’s already 9pm. Her mother has already gone back to her hotel.

“I need to give him a bath before putting him to bed,” she replies. Steve continues to stare at her.

“I can do that.”

“And feed him.”

Steve sighs. “Okay, so feed him, and then go to bed and I can do the rest. I promise.”

MJ thinks it over for a minute. The thought of Nick going to sleep without her watchful eye monitoring every part of the routine makes her extremely anxious, and yet she is bone-achingly exhausted, and judging by the look in Steve’s face it’s showing. 

“Are you sure?” She asks quietly, the question probably directed more at herself than him. Steve almost looks a little hurt, but the expression passes quickly, before he speaks.

“I want to. I’m missing so much. It would be nice.” 

So MJ nods uncertainly, and gives Nick his “last” feed (which means absolutely nothing, since she’ll have to be up again in a few hours for the next one), and then Steve kisses her goodnight and she nervously heads off to bed. 

The level of exhaustion she’s experiencing is beyond words. She barely has enough energy to get into her pajamas, and she needs to take a shower but she doesn’t think she could stand up long enough to do so. Every part of her hurts, screaming at her to lie down. And yet, when she finally gets herself into bed, her brain just won’t shut off enough to get to sleep. 

At least there’s some physical relief, and the beautiful comfort of her mattress. She lies in the dark for a while, before she suddenly realizes she can hear Steve speaking to Nick, talking him through the steps of bathtime, narrating everything he’s doing. Oh. She smiles a little to herself as she hears Steve sing a little bath song, something she’s never heard before. He might be making it up. She should let him do this more often. It’s hard for her to separate herself from her baby, very hard, but maybe she should share the load a bit more.

She listens to the rest of the routine, hearing Steve bring him to the nursery, and sing a little lullaby. “Scarborough Fair.” She laughs. It’s beautiful, though, and she almost feels calmed by it too. Not enough to get to sleep, but a little more peaceful.

And then more time passes, and finally the bedroom door creaks, and she hears Steve creep in, clearly trying not to make any noise.

“It’s okay, I’m awake,” she whispers, reaching up and turning the light on.

“Oh. Did I wake you?”

“No,” she laughs emptily. “I can’t sleep. As usual.” 

He looks at her sympathetically. “You’re still not sleeping?”

She doesn’t answer, adjusting the blanket over her instead. She watches as he changes into his pajamas, and then finally joins her in bed. He can’t spoon her the way he knows she likes; she’s still too sore from surgery to lie on her side. So instead he curls up beside her as she lies on her back, running his hand through her hair and kissing her cheek.

“So, uh,” he starts, a little awkwardly. “Your mom told me you had a bit of a meltdown today.”

She tenses, and he feels it. It clicks for her—that’s why he forced her to go to bed. Her mother had told him she was fragile, unstable.

“Of course she did.”

Steve sighs, stroking her arm with his thumb. “Are you okay?”

“I’m just… really tired.”

“I know.” 

MJ takes a deep breath, determined not to cry again, but these days it’s as though she’s permanently on the brink, all her emotions just sitting raw on the surface and ready to unleash at any time.

“She’s such a bitch sometimes,” she whispers, as if maybe her mother is listening from her hotel across town. “And if she doesn’t shut up about how it got easier for her with each new kid-”

“Oh.” He understands suddenly. She’s said nothing—not one word that wasn’t a quick joke in passing—about the sudden, unexpected end to her childbearing years, but in this moment he suddenly realizes how heavily it has, in fact, been weighing on her. She’s still determined not to cry, though it’s getting harder.

“I just… I don’t know. I feel… different. I don’t know how.” She pauses, forcing herself to take a second, get herself together. “It’s not… it doesn’t really make sense. But I feel like I’m… not a woman anymore. And I shouldn’t, and it doesn’t make sense, and I know that being a woman has nothing to do with having a uterus, and it’s all so stupid but it just… feels that way.” She’s a little frantic, trying to defend herself from the embarrassing nature of her own thoughts, feelings, knowing they’re irrational and yet terrified Steve will think so too.

“I’m sorry,” is all he says. And then: “You know I don’t see you any differently, right? This hasn’t… changed anything for me. You’re still the same woman to me. I need you to know that.”

She nods, though she’s not sure if the words really get through to her. “I know.”

“And watching you be a mom is just… the most amazing thing ever. I really... I just love you so much. That’s all.”

She nods once more. “I love you too.” She sits silently for a moment before she turns her head to him, still forcing the tears back. “You deserve to be able to have more children,” she whispers, turning away from him again.

“Mary Jane. For starters, let’s see how we do with one before we start worrying about whether we should have more.” She cracks a little smile, and he squeezes her hand. “And then, if we want more, we’ll have more somehow. We can still have tons of kids even if you can’t get pregnant. All I care about is that you're the person I get to raise those children with.”

“Okay.”

“Seriously, though, let’s stick to one for now because… Jesus Christ,” he chuckles. 

She laughs in response. “Yeah, this is nuts.” 

He kisses her cheek again, reaching up to turn the lamp at her bedside off. 

“You’re an amazing mom, MJ.” God, he’s just so sappy, she thinks, and yet she can’t help but smile a little.

“You’re alright, I suppose,” she responds, but she nuzzles her face against Steve’s shoulder. “Nick is so lucky to have a dad like you.”

“He’s a very lucky kid.” MJ closes her eyes. “Goodnight, honey.”

“Goodnight, Steve.”

She keeps her head against his shoulder, the closest she can get to a real cuddle before her body finishes healing, thinking about his words, trying to hear them. He says she’s still the same to him. It doesn’t make her feel any less changed, any less useless and broken, but maybe she can try and believe him. Maybe that counts for something.

Miraculously, she finally starts to drift off to sleep.


	16. September to November 2001

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The world falls apart, and MJ and Steve move to Connecticut.

Steve can count on one hand the amount of times he has seen his wife really, really scared. The end of each pregnancy. The night she had Nick.

But on September 11, 2001, MJ is terrified. 

She’s playing with Nick in the living room, her mom cleaning up in the kitchen, when Steve walks in and quietly tells her to turn on the news. They do, and then Carolyn comes in, and they all watch in disbelief, in absolute horror, frozen and unable to look away. MJ clutches Nick tightly against her chest, some kind of deep, strange, new maternal fear kicking in, and she holds him close as she absorbs the images onscreen, desperate to protect him from… something. The horrors of the world. 

And they watch, and watch, barely blinking. But when the first tower collapses, she suddenly feels breathless, and she stands quickly, needing to not look at this anymore, needing to get out. “I can’t-,” she gasps, and Carolyn (in a rare moment of helpfulness) reaches over and takes the baby away from her. MJ doesn’t want to be parted from him, not now, but she’s also suddenly very very afraid and knows she needs to step away, so she quickly leaves him with her mother and starts down the hall to her room. She doesn’t even realize Steve is following her until he appears in the doorway, taking in her appearance as she sits on the edge of the bed, nearly hyperventilating.

“Okay, honey, it’s okay,” he whispers, approaching the bed and kneeling in front of her as she sits, grabbing her hands.

“It’s not.” Tears spring to her eyes, and she’s still not breathing normally, and he squeezes her hands comfortingly. “What the fuck, Steve.”

“No, it’s not, but…” He wishes he knew what to say, how to make her feel better when the world they know is literally crumbling, how to make her feel safe when he’s terrified too. “You’re okay, you’re here, and Nick is here, and I’m here and we’re all alright.”

She doesn’t understand quite why she’s so terrified, except that the world seems so much scarier now that she has a son to protect. Not that she trusted the safety of her world before today, but now she’s responsible for someone else’s life, and the thought of anything happening to him is so real and so, so frightening. And then it occurs to her: Steve’s new job. They’re supposed to move in seven weeks.

“We’re not moving,” she blurts out, processing the information as she speaks, blinking rapidly. 

“MJ, I-” 

“No, I don’t care if you’ve already told them, or if you… I don’t care, we can’t, you’re not working in New York, I can’t-” She’s growing more and more frantic, and he places a hand on her thigh, wanting to calm her.

“MJ, take a breath,” he soothes, and she does, trying to slow her racing thoughts. “We’re going to move, and it’s going to be fine, nothing is going to happen to any of us.” She looks at him, knowing it’s an empty promise, but the look in his eyes says he means it. And in a way, he does. He’d do anything to protect Nick, and her. She tries to smile, but the tears are still coming.

“This is so fucking scary,” she mutters, and he nods, though he’s not sure if she means the events of the day or just life in general, being a mom. He doesn’t know what to say, because she’s right, it is scary, all of it. Instead, he gently sits next to her on the bed, and wraps her up in his arms. She leans her head into his chest, her shoulders still shaking as she cries into his shirt. It crosses his mind that she cries differently now, that she’s changed—she used to be so quiet, as if her tears were always a secret she was still trying to keep. But these past few years he has seen held her while she sobbed loudly, angrily, more times than he can count. Like she shatters more easily.

She picks herself up.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“I should go check on Nick.” She wipes her eyes, moving to stand, but he holds her there for one more second, squeezing her hand.

“I love you. It’s going to be okay.”

She smiles a little. “Love you too.”

\---

And move, they do.

On chilly November 1st, their stuff is all packed and ready to go into the truck, and both of MJ's sisters are in Chicago and eager to help, especially since Carolyn had finally returned home a few weeks earlier. Which is fine by her—she'd much rather have Stephanie and Maggie here to help her out, and she can't get enough of watching them hold her little boy. Family.

There’s nothing like packing up all your worldly belongings to remind you that, no matter how great you’d been feeling, you are still very much recovering from major surgery. By the night before the move, she’s in pretty serious pain, and right before she heads off to sleep she quietly slips into the bag containing the packed up contents of her medicine cabinet, and finds the unfinished bottle of morphine she’d been prescribed after surgery. She had a few pills left over, which she thought she’d keep just in case. She’s glad she did. MJ pops one and then climbs into bed, hoping a good night’s sleep will be enough rest for her to wake up feeling better.

She doesn’t. Well, maybe marginally, but she practically gasps in pain as she sits up the morning of the move, and the first thing she does after dragging herself out of bed is dig for the morphine once again, popping another pill. Thankfully, it does its job, and before she knows it, Steve and her and her sisters are dragging boxes into a truck, taking turns cuddling Nick, trying to get everything done as quickly as possible. 

They get started early, so everything’s packed up in the truck by 9am. Thus begins one of the longest days of MJ’s life, as they embark on the 12 hour drive to their new home, the four of them plus a baby crammed into their car. Stephanie and Maggie try to keep the mood fun, but there’s a clear misery in the air. It’s too cold, and too hot, and Nick is fussy, and he doesn’t like the car, but she doesn’t want to pull over, and everything about the journey is frustrating. Not to mention, by the time afternoon rolls around she can tell the last bit of pain relief is wearing off, and things are getting bad. 

It probably wasn’t a good idea for her to take the drugs right before doing all that physical labour, because her body is certainly feeling the effects now. She wishes she could take another pill, but they’re off in a truck somewhere, so instead she just tries to keep breathing, keep going. She isn’t doing great. Eventually it becomes clear that she needs to get herself something for the pain if she’s going to get through the rest of this car ride.

“I’m going to need to stop soon,” she says quietly to Steve, not sure exactly why she is being so discreet.

“You need to go to the bathroom?”

“Yeah,” she lies instinctively, before realizing that he might just pull over at a rest stop. “Actually, can we stop by a drugstore?”

He glances over at her a little inquisitively. “Sure.” She does not offer up any more information, feeling strangely vulnerable, not wanting to admit she’s hurting. She leans her head back once more, allowing her eyes to slide shut, not bothering to fight the tempting lull of sleep.

And then suddenly she hears Nick cry, and she jolts awake, just barely managing to conceal a pained gasp at the sudden movement. The clock now reads 4:00—she’s been asleep for almost an hour, and boy does she feel it. Now she’s not only in pain, but she’s drowsy, and sweaty, and she has to pee, and God why is he crying so loudly?

“Sorry, you were asleep and I didn’t want to wake you up. I promise I’ll stop at the next place I see.”

She nods without speaking, and turns to try and soothe Nick in the back, Stephanie and Maggie both looking slightly confused at his sudden crying, not sure what to do. MJ wiggles her fingers at him, smiling forcefully, trying to get him calm again, but it’s no use. She knows he’s hungry. She’ll need to wait until they’ve pulled over so she can feed him.

Steve manages to find a drugstore within twenty minutes, but it feels like ages, as Nick’s crying grows louder and louder and every discomfort she’s feeling continues to grow. Finally, they’re parked in the lot of a big general store, and she’s desperately trying to get him fed so it will be over and she can just go have one moment’s peace and down a handful of pills. Finally, he’s quiet.

“Maggie, please take him,” she begs, unable to stop herself from sounding desperate. Her youngest sister quickly grabs him from her arms, and MJ is leaping to her feet with far more energy than she thought she had, rushing inside and finding herself a bottle of advil and some water. She quickly pays and rushes to the bathroom, swallowing two pills before she even gets there.

She stands at the sink once she’s finished, the overly sweet smell of handsoap almost making her a little nauseous. She thinks for a minute before popping one more pill, knowing she needs serious help to get through the last hours of this journey. And as she slides the pill bottle back into her purse, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror.

She looks like shit. Purple bags sit under her eyes, and she blinks at herself in the mirror, running a hand through her hair to try and tame it. She truly looks half dead, and as she looks at herself, she feels the all-too-familiar tears spring to her eyes, and suddenly, as she so often does these days, she finds herself starting to cry. Well, it was only a matter of time, she supposes.

She’s about to head back into a stall for some privacy to pull herself together, but just as she turns around the bathroom door swings open, and there’s Stephanie. MJ practically jumps, furiously wiping tears from her cheeks, unsure what to do.

“MJ! Are you crying?” She literally wants to hide, but Steph walks up to her quickly, reaching out and grabbing her hands. She gives her a sympathetic smile. “What’s wrong?”

MJ is wildly uncomfortable. “Nothing, I’m sorry,” she chokes out, but her voice is strained with emotion. Steph looks into her eyes, questioning, and gives her hand a squeeze. 

“Well clearly something is.” MJ almost laughs. “Seriously, what’s going on?”

MJ takes a bit of a breath, glancing around, not used to sharing like this. “It’s just been a long day. And I’m kind of… I’m in a lot of pain.” It’s a bit of a relief to say it out loud. Stephanie looks taken aback.

“Oh gosh! You should have told us!” MJ smiles apologetically, vaguely aware of how Steph has no clue how little she’s ever told her younger sisters about what she feels. She’s the one who takes care of their feelings. Not the other way around. Never mind the fact that growing up, this left her with no one to share hers with. That’s hard to unlearn.

“Sorry,” MJ whispers. And then Stephanie reaches around her and wraps her up in a hug, a tight one, the kind that holds you together when you’re falling apart. It hurts a little, and yet it’s so very needed she doesn’t mind. Suddenly, MJ lets out a loud sob, and Steph forces herself not to show her worry as she continues to hold her.

“Oh MJ…” She whispers, stroking her back. The embarrassment is passing, and MJ melts further into her younger sister’s arms, surrendering to her breakdown. Stephanie probably thinks this is a rare occurrence, she realizes, no idea how frequently MJ loses it like this these days. She’s sure it’s just lack of sleep, and other moms tell her it’s normal to be a mess for the first months of motherhood, but still. MJ doesn’t like mess. “It’s okay. We’re going to make sure you’re okay for the rest of the drive, okay?”

MJ nods, pulling herself together. “Thank you. I’m sorry.” 

“Stop saying you’re sorry. I’m not mom,” she says gently, and MJ smiles a little, before the words settle in somewhere deeper. That’s what it is. It’s never fully occurred to her, though clearly it has for Steph. She hates feelings because her mother forbade them. It’s a striking realization.

“Wow. When did you become the big sister?”

Stephanie laughs. “Well, you’re a mom now, so I figure your hands are pretty full. I’m taking over some of the load.” MJ chuckles in agreement. “But… we do want to take care of you. You are so good at making sure everyone else is alright. But it’s okay for you to not be okay sometimes. You know that, right?”

MJ nods, because she does know that, even if it doesn’t quite permeate through her barriers for her to actually accept it as truth. “It’s hard when you’re a mom,” she whispers. “I need to be okay for him.”

Steph nods, and MJ can see in her eyes that she understands. She’s always been wise. “You’re still a person, though.”

“You’re right.” MJ stands up straighter, wiping her face again. “Well, this is by far the most moving conversation I have ever had in a public bathroom, but we should probably go.”

They had back outside, Maggie holding the baby and Steve looking at both of them questioningly in response to their long absence, before registering MJ’s red eyes. She hadn’t bothered to clean her face, try and look presentable.

“Everything okay?” He asks hesitantly.

“Completely.” He takes her hand as he guides her towards the passenger seat, waiting for the younger girls to climb back in before whispering to her again.

“Really, are you okay?”

“Yeah. I’m feeling much better now. Let’s go.”

They get back in the car. The air of misery has lifted slightly. Sometimes it just takes a quick cry in a roadside bathroom, she thinks to herself. And eventually, they make it to their new home.

\--

The younger girls and Steve get everything into the new house, as MJ takes Nick into a room where a mattress has been unloaded next to Nick’s crib, and immediately falls asleep next to him on top of it. It’s hours later when Steve enters the room, taking in the sight of his wife and son in deep sleep on their haphazardly unloaded furniture. He’ll deal with putting beds in their proper places in the morning. For now, he just wants to lie down.

When he sits on the mattress, she awakens with a start.

“Sorry, didn’t meant to startle you,” he apologizes. She looks at him in something like disbelief.

“How long have I been asleep?” She asks, disoriented. She checks on Nick in the crib, glancing at him to make sure he’s okay.

“A while. Let’s go back to sleep. You’ve had a long day.”

“So have you,” she argues. 

“I think we could both use some sleep,” he clarifies. He’s wearing just a pair of sweatpants and no shirt, and he has brought a comforter with him, which he drapes over the two of them before allowing her to curl up into him. She’s still a little sore, but his chest feels so warm against her back and she needs to be held. 

“Steve,” she says suddenly. “I need Nick to have younger siblings.”

He draws back in surprise, unable to see her face. “What?”

“I just… I want him to have that. It’s important to me.”

Steve pulls her tighter into him, kissing the back of her head. He can tell she’s still a little out of it right now, but that the sentiment is genuine.

“Let’s get this house set up, and then as soon as that’s done, we’ll start looking into our options for having more kids. One major life event at a time.”

MJ laughs, and he feels the vibrations against his chest. “Fair enough.” He wonders if the topic will fade, but she speaks again. “I think I want to adopt.”

“Oh?” He’s a little taken aback by this, not having realized this is something that she’s clearly been thinking about. “Okay. We’ll look into that.”

She smiles to herself. It feels nice to say that thought out loud, as opposed to just letting it bounce around her head like she’s been doing for the past month. She wants another kid. Even if it’s so soon, even though she knows she needs to wait a bit. She does not want to have one kid, doesn’t want her son to be an only child.

The words reverberate in the room, as she slowly drifts off once again, this time in Steve’s arms.


	17. May to August 2002

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MJ has a birthday and some big conversations.

The day MJ turns 28, May 1st, she can’t help but feel about 100 years older than she was on her last birthday.

Motherhood ages you, she supposes. Steve seems older too. She realizes it as she awakens that morning to the sound of crying over the baby monitor, watching him slide out of bed. 

“Happy birthday.” He kisses her forehead. “Stay in bed.”

He disappears and returns with Nick, laying him down on MJ’s stomach as she stays under the blanket. She smiles at him as he crawls up towards her chest.

“I’ll be back with coffee.”

It’s a very blissful birthday morning, one of the best ones she’s ever had. Just her and her husband and her son in bed, Nick lying on top of her, his little hands scratching at her skin as he babbles. She sips her coffee and takes in the sight of her two men. It’s lovely.

Steve heads off to work, and then he comes home to spend the evening with MJ and Nick, their “family time.” It’s incredible how the word family has taken on entirely new meanings for her. She never really knew it could be like this, that she could feel so much love. 

In fact, she’s starting to dread the thought of leaving any part of it behind. Nick is nine months old now, so she knows she should really be thinking about going back to work, but the idea makes her uneasy. Steve has brought it up a few times now, probably thinking she’s bored at home or doesn’t want to be forced into some kind of suburban housewife role, and yet she’s starting to think maybe that’s exactly what she wants. She’s a little confused about it all. So when he brings it up, she gets a bit snippy, and then he drops it and she feels guilty, as always. 

In the living room, she watches Steve converse with Nick, his favourite game to play. Nick is very talkative, a constant babbler, and Steve discusses intently with him as if they are having a lively political debate. It cracks MJ up every time, Nick excitedly announcing nonsense syllables, and Steve putting on his best lawyer voice to respond “I see your point, but I think you failed to consider-” before being cut off by another string of gibberish. And Steve glances up at her every once in a while, just to see her smile. 

Nothing has ever made sense to her like this.

Truthfully, very little has ever made sense to her. Writing used to make sense, the way she could create worlds and stories and people with just her words, the way she could play with language and make something new and special. But then one day it didn’t anymore, and she was lost. She hasn’t written anything since the day she finished college. And that had been her dream, the thing she built her life around, and when it stopped feeling right, she’d been uprooted, unsure what exactly she was living for anymore. Or why. Steve had helped a bit, giving her a sense of belonging, but she’d still been purposeless. Until now. Being a mom is everything to her, and finally she knows why she’s alive, what she’s living for.

They put Nick to bed together, and then Steve guides MJ back to the living room, sits her down on the couch. He kisses her softly, a hand on her cheek.

“I have your last present.”

He gave her a few things earlier that day, a stack of books from an author she loves, a fancy new coffee machine, a pair of earrings. Now he returns with one last gift bag, tissue paper overflowing.

He hands it to her, and she carefully pulls the paper off, her hands settling around a thick book. She pulls it out.

Her own calligraphy, in gold: “The Healys.” The scrapbook she gave him for his birthday two years ago, a month after her second miscarriage. She’d left most of the pages blank for them to fill it with photos of their family, one day. At the time she could barely imagine those pages would ever be filled.

“I’ve been working on the new chapter,” he explains, smiling a little nervously. She flips through the pages, past the first dates, the wedding photos, the trip to Mexico. And then new pages, meticulously laid out by Steve. The beach vacation where MJ had gotten pregnant once again. Her baby shower. Them holding Nick in the hospital, his first days at home, first trips to the park.

“Oh my god.”

“What a year, huh?”

MJ laughs. “God.” She can’t even look up from it, can’t pull her eyes off the photos. “This is so beautiful. Thank you.” 

He climbs beside her on the couch, extending his arm around her. She leans into his chest, the scrapbook still open in her lap.

“I’m going to reread this from start to finish.” And she does, flipping to the first page, looking through it photo by photo. The story of the best things that have ever happened to her, the two people who saved her. As she lands on the photos of Nick, watching him age week by week, month by month, staring at photos of herself looking happier than she’s ever been before, it hits her: this is what she’s meant to do. This is who she’s meant to be. Completely.

Her mind is suddenly spiralling, everything moving quickly, overwhelming her. “Steve, I don’t want to go back to work,” she says abruptly, her voice firm.

“What?”

“I just…” She slows the rapid swirling of her thoughts, trying to find sanity again. She gets like this sometimes, where her brain feels wired and unhinged and fiery, but she also knows she’s speaking the truth, that this sentiment is genuine. She just needs to calm herself down a little. “I’ve been so happy at home, with him, just… being a mom. I don’t think I want to work anymore, I think I just want to raise him, give him everything I can. And the others. When we have them.”

Steve nods, processing. “Okay, that makes sense.”

“Sorry to spring that on you, I just… had to get it off my chest.”

“If it’s what you want then it’s what you should do.” He squeezes her. “A housewife, huh. I want you to start wearing cute little frilly aprons and baking fresh cookies every day.” 

MJ chuckles. “Buy me an apron and we’ll talk.” 

\--

She’s strangely at peace once that decision has been made, like the last puzzle piece has finally slotted into place. She’s sure that peace won’t last—knowing her, she’ll find something to stress about sooner or later, but for now she’s just enjoying her new life with Nick, lugging him around the house as she does chores, enjoying some quiet time to herself when he naps. Steve notices it too. She seems good, happy, fulfilled. It makes his heart soar. 

But as August approaches, and with it Nick’s first birthday, she’s becoming more and more aware of how badly she wants another child. 

Nick is everything, but she has this new burning desire, like something deep within her feels she’s meant to have another kid. A girl. She wants a girl so badly, and she’s starting to obsess about it in that way she does, when something is on her mind and it suddenly starts to consume her.

She tells herself she can’t bring it up until Nick turns one. She throws him an adorable birthday party, invites a few moms she’s met at the park in Greenport with children around his age to come for a little gathering. She makes a cake, a fancy one, even though it’s been a while, and the other moms remark on how impressive it is. She enjoys that more than she should. She’s become friends with another mom, Courtney, with a daughter, Madison, born right around the same time as Nick. She thinks she likes Courtney, and they take the kids to the same mommy-and-me swim classes and reading groups, but there’s also a bit of a strange tension between them that she can’t quite pinpoint. Even so, Courtney is quickly becoming her closest friend in this new community she’s trying to find her place in. And when Courtney tells her she can’t believe how cute this party was, she has to force herself not to gloat. It feels so good.

She holds herself to her promise to not bring up adoption until Nick is one, and then the day after the birthday party, she sits on the bed with Steve, in her pajamas, fidgeting with the frayed edge of a blanket.

“What is it?”

She’s caught off guard by the question. “What?”

Steve smiles at her. “You always fiddle with your hands when you’re trying to figure out how to say something. What is it?”

She drops the blanket. “Oh.” She’s never really realized she did that. “I’ve been thinking a lot about… adopting.”

“Oh!” He’s glad that’s all she’s thinking about, as he always gets nervous when he can see her getting stuck in her own head. “Okay! Let’s do it.”

She laughs. “That easy?”

He pauses for a moment, reconsidering how quickly he said yes. “Well, I definitely think it’s something we should absolutely do. But.... Nick is pretty young. Are you sure you don’t want to wait a bit longer?” MJ nods. 

“I do, for sure, but I was talking to Courtney because her sister adopted and she said the process took so long, like a few years, so I was thinking maybe we should start it now so that by the time we’re all good to go and ready to take our kid home, Nick will be a few years older.”

“Oh. That makes sense.” He thinks for a moment, slightly alarmed at how suddenly they’ve shifted into this gear. He really does want to, but it’s all just so quick. “Okay. What else did Courtney tell you? Since clearly you’ve been chatting.” He’s a little surprised to learn she’s brought this up with her friends before him, but he pushes that thought aside.

“Her sister adopted from Catholic Family Services, and she said it was-”

“We’re not really that Catholic, are we?” He interrupts. MJ laughs a little. 

“I mean, technically we are.” It’s true they haven’t stepped foot in a church since their wedding day, but she still feels a deep connection to it all, albeit a cautious one. “And she just said that it’s really great there and they try really hard to find a good match for everyone and, I don’t know, it seemed good.”

Steve is quiet for a second, reaching out to take her hand. “Okay. Let’s do it. Contact them, set up a… I don’t know. Appointment, consultation, paperwork, whatever we need to do.” 

She grins, and he leans in to kiss her, his hand on the back of her head. “I will.”

He snuggles into her side, pulling her into him. “Baby number two.”

“And I won’t even have to have a near-death experience. It’s win-win.” 

Steve chuckles. “That is definitely a bonus.”

\--

“Hi, darling.” 

Her mother hasn’t come to visit the new place yet, which annoys MJ a little bit, but she also remembers how many years it took her to finally come visit Chicago when MJ moved there.

“Hi mom.”

Even so, things are less tense, and her mother keeps trying to get MJ to come home and visit. She probably will soon. She likes the idea of Nick getting to see where she grew up, even though he is of course too young to really see or understand anything, but the symbolism is nice. She promises her mother this in tonight’s Sunday night conversation, their weekly catch-up. “I definitely want to come soon. As soon as Steve can get some time off.” That’s easier said than done, she knows, but she doesn’t point that out.

Besides, she wants to tell her the big news, that she has a first consultation booked at Catholic Family Services for next month. Her hands twitch a little with excitement as she readies herself.

“I have some news,” she starts.

“You’re pregnant again?”

The words hit her so hard she reacts physically, placing her hand on her chest in shock. What the fuck? She’s not sure if she’s really that forgetful, or just that insensitive, and she can’t help but think the latter is more likely. Sure enough, her mother clarifies: “That was a joke.”

She resists the urge to bite back “well, it wasn’t funny,” and takes a deep breath instead. Regardless, the excitement of the moment is gone. Instead, she speaks quietly. 

“Steve and I are going to adopt another child. We want our family to be bigger, want a sibling for Nick. A sister.”

There’s a bit of silence. “Oh. Who are you adopting from?”

MJ can’t help but notice the lack of enthusiasm on the other end of the line. “We’re going through Catholic Family Services.” Maybe that’ll cheer her mother up a little.

“Well, that’s good.”

There’s more silence, longer this time. “You don’t sound… happy,” MJ finally points out.

“I think it’s very brave of you,” Carolyn says quietly.

“Brave?”

She hears her mother clear her throat through the phone. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t feel confident doing it. I’d be too scared. I couldn’t raise someone else’s child, couldn’t give them the same-”

“But she won’t be someone else’s child, she’ll be mine.”

Her mother sighs. “You know what I meant.”

She scratches the back of her right hand with her left, a little harder than she should, hurting herself a bit. The words are so appalling, and anger is rising quickly to the surface, but there’s something else too—the place deep in her stomach where the words resonate more than they should. She wants so badly to believe she’ll be able to raise this child with every ounce of maternal love she now knows she’s capable of, have the same unconditional, beyond-words love for her second child that she had for her first. And yet, a small part of her wonders if her mother is right.

She looks at Nick like she’s never looked at anyone else before. He came from her, from her and Steve, from her body and from years of tears and grief and desperation. When she rode in the ambulance the night he was born, in a moment where death was more real to her than it had ever been before, she knew without question that she was willing to die for him. He hadn’t even been born yet, and she was ready to lay down her life. She loves him with a fierceness that sometimes catches her off guard, now understanding how mothers can lift cars off their children. She has a feeling she could do anything to protect Nick.

Will she be able to feel that for a child she didn’t carry inside her, who isn’t connected to her by some strange biological magic?

“I’m going to love both my children very much,” she answers, a hint of venom in her tone, speaking just as much to herself. “I’m not worried about that.” It’s a lie, but she can’t tell anyone that this scares her. It doesn’t seem right to worry about this. This child will be her own, her daughter just as much as Nick is her son. She has to trust that she will be able to love her. 

“I think it’s a very brave thing to do,” Carolyn repeats, and MJ is getting too upset to continue this conversation any further.

“It’s not brave, mom. At all. I just want to have another child. That’s it.”

“There’s no need to get rude. I’m being nice.” MJ kind of wants to scream.

“Okay, mom, thanks for calling. I’ll talk to you again next week.”

“Oh? Alright. Goodbye. And I hope you’ll visit soon.”

MJ hangs up the phone with more force than she intends.

It’s worse when she’s right.

Well, she’s wrong in some ways too, of course. MJ knows she isn’t being brave at all. She’s just a woman who wants more children and can’t have them herself. Sure, it’s nice to know she will give a loving home to a child who otherwise might not have one, but she won’t pretend she’s doing this out of selflessness. This is for this girl, but it’s also for her, and for Steve, and for Nick, and all she can hope is that her daughter will be happy here with them. Whenever she gets here.

Nick is staring at her from the floor, a colourful block in his hand, his face a little confused. She realizes she probably looks unhappy, so she smiles, and he smiles back. There it is. The smile melts a bit of her bad mood.

She can’t wait to see what kind of joyous smile her daughter will have, she thinks to herself. Her daughter. She wants her so badly it eats at her from inside. Just like she used to want her first child. In some strange way, she feels like her daughter is out there waiting for her, even though logically she knows the girl she will adopt probably hasn’t been born yet. She still can’t shake the feeling that there’s a girl who’s destined to be hers, and she will find her way to her. She desperately needs to meet her, to hold her, to see her. 

That’s how she reassures herself as her mother’s words echo in her head. “I couldn’t raise someone else’s child.”Amidst her nerves, she still knows her daughter will be hers. Even if she didn’t carry her for nine months, even if she didn’t almost die to give her life. She’ll be hers because MJ wants her with everything in her.

She just has to find her.


	18. September 2002

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MJ and Steve meet with Catholic Family Services, and Nick hits a milestone.

“Tell me a bit about yourselves.”

Lord how she hates that question. She never knows what the hell to say. She doesn't really know who she is, to be honest.

Having a family makes it a little bit easier, though, especially since she still gets a little kick out of telling people she’s a mom. 

“Well, we’ve been married four years, and we have a son, Nick, who just turned one.”

The woman at the desk smiles warmly. 

“I’m a lawyer,” Steve jumps in. “And Mary Jane stays home with him, she’s a full-time mom.” They’re hoping that’ll be a good selling point for this whole adoption thing. “We moved to Connecticut less than a year ago.”

“That’s wonderful,” the woman says. MJ has forgotten her name, and she’s looking around the desk for clues that aren’t there. Shouldn’t she have a nameplate or something? “And what brought you to adoption?”

They’ve planned their answer carefully, almost scripted it. 

“We really love being parents, and I’ve always wanted to have more children, but there were some complications when I gave birth, and I can’t get pregnant again. But I grew up very close to my siblings, so it’s important to me.”

“And we love the idea of being able to give another child a really amazing home. MJ is a wonderful mom, and her being home makes us an ideal environment for a kid to adjust to. We’ll have all the time in the world for our children.”

The social worker chuckles a little. “You don’t have to sell yourselves to me, I promise. You seem like wonderful parents, and we’re glad to have you as applicants. Don’t worry.”

MJ smiles, relieved, pulling on the bottom of her shirt to adjust it. That’s good to hear. 

The social worker walks them through the process: materials they'll have to study, interviews they'll have to be approved through, and then, of course, the waiting. “It's really impossible to say how long it will take,” she explains. “Could be months, could be years. It depends on a lot of factors.”

They sign up for some of the informational courses offered, all the necessary steps to be approved for adoption, ones for newborns and then a few for older child adoptions just to see. The social worker informs them that they should be approved by the end of the month, and then they will just wait until an expectant mother chooses them, usually a few months before birth but sometimes a little more last minute. MJ and Steve nod vigorously, determined to prove they understand, that they're patient, that they're in it for the long haul. And then they head home, some reading material in hand.

They don’t say a word on the car ride home.

\--

They thank the babysitter profusely, and Steve gives MJ a quick kiss goodbye before heading off to work—he only took the morning off for their appointment, but he’s swamped, so he’s clearly eager to get back. MJ had hoped maybe his morning off would give them the chance to grab brunch after, or something, but she gets it. His work is important, especially now that she’s decided it will be their only source of income. Anyways, she’s excited to read through some of the reading material.

She sits on the couch, Nick in front of her on a playmat, leafing through the pamphlets. Information on all sorts of different scenarios: open and closed adoptions, foster kids, older children, newborns. She jumps into that one. Those are her only two criteria for their adoption: she wants a girl, and she wants a newborn. She’s still a little nervous (though she’d never admit it, not even to Steve) about the idea of bonding with a child who isn’t biologically hers, but having her baby from birth seems less scary, and more familiar. Like something she can handle. Not to mention she thinks it’ll be nice to get to relive the whole newborn phase without the emotional trauma and overwhelming physical pain she had with her first one. 

They’d been informed that wanting a newborn almost definitely meant a much longer wait time, which was fine. She wasn’t quite ready anyways. She still had a baby at home, who took up a lot of her energy. A few years of waiting would be good. 

Right?

God, she drives herself crazy sometimes. Truthfully, MJ isn’t very good at waiting. That’s the problem with this whole thing. Rationally, she knows she should wait at least year or two before bringing home another baby, but she’s just so obsessive. About everything. Now that this idea is in her head, she’s going to think about it non-stop until it finally comes to fruition. She’s always been like this, high-strung, on edge, and especially as she’s grown up she’s become more, well, crazy. Like her brain is always operating at twice the intensity of everyone else’s, her thoughts so fast she can barely keep up. 

Nick is babbling away in front of her, smiling as he presses buttons on some plastic contraption. She looks down at the photos of day-old infants in the pamphlet she holds, then back up at him, then down, then up. How did he get to be so much bigger? It really feels like she was just holding her six-pound little baby, and now he’s so big, so smiley, so chatty and fun and curious.

“Mmm?” He calls out, louder than his usual chatter, clearly trying to get her attention. 

“Yes, pumpkin?” She replies, as if he’ll answer, but she smiles and reaches out to scoop him up, laying back on the couch and letting him rest in her lap. He touches her chest with little fingers, one hand reaching up to clutch at her hair. He giggles.

“Mama.”

She gasps audibly, and Nick suddenly looks alarmed. She quickly shifts to a huge smile, and he grins in response, relieved. 

“Mama?” She repeats, thinking maybe she imagined it. She’d been wondering when she’d hear first words—he’s not late, or behind, but certainly not early either, and considering how he’s always chattering at her she is always trying to pick out clear syllables, possible words. Maybe she’s just reading into his gibberish.

But she hears it again, “mama,” and then again and again and again. Her joy is infectious, and now that he’s figured out that he can say it, and that it makes mama happy, he repeats the word over and over. She’s grinning from ear to ear, sure that she could live in this moment for the rest of her life, Nick’s eyes glinting with pride as he confidently repeats it to her over and over. Mama.

“Good job,” she coos, squeezing him. “Little smarty pants.”

He finally quiets down, and they lay there a bit longer, his hands pawing at her shirt, before finally he reaches out towards his toy again, signalling he’d like to be put back on the floor. She happily complies, and he once again becomes absorbed in his button pressing. 

She could use a coffee. She stands, heading towards the kitchen, Nick vaguely watching her as she leaves.

If only Steve had stayed home this morning, like she’d hoped he might, he would have been there for this too. She wonders if she should call him, tell him, but something in her hesitates. Maybe this is too special, too monumental to recount over the phone, and she should wait until he comes home tonight. Or maybe, just maybe, she wants to enjoy being the only one who knows about Nick’s first words just a little bit longer. Steve could have stayed home, if he’d really wanted to, but he didn’t. She wanted him to, and he didn’t. So now he has to go a few more hours without knowing.

She takes her coffee. She won’t call him for now. Maybe later. She’ll see.

She returns to the living room, and Nick looks up at her, eyes smiling in recognition. She’ll never get over that, the fact that no matter how long she’s been gone, whether it was a minute or a few hours, when he sees her again he smiles like he’s over the moon that she’s back. She smiles back.

“Mama,” he states firmly, and she nods. 

“Yes.”


	19. December 2002

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MJ, Steve, and Nick go to Carolyn's for Christmas, and get a call that changes everything.

They decide to spend Christmas at MJ's mom's place. Well, not _at_ her place—neither she nor Steve are really interested in staying over there—but they book a hotel room in MJ’s hometown, and brace themselves for the adventure of flying with Nick for the first time. 

So December 23rd they’re up at the crack of dawn and on their way to the airport, hoping against hope this won’t be a complete disaster. It doesn’t help that MJ is a very nervous flyer, but she manages to pull herself together and survive the journey, bouncing Nick in her lap when he briefly becomes a little fussy. Overall, it’s remarkably smooth, and she and Steve both breathe a sigh of relief when they get off the plane. They made it.

Stephanie picks them up at the airport, clearly far more excited to see Nick than to see her sister, and she brings them to the hotel, a very quaint place. Stephanie is clearly eager to spend time with them, and MJ feels a little guilty kicking her out, but Nick is miraculously asleep in the little hotel crib and she can barely keep her eyes open from exhaustion—and she figures it’s a good idea for her to get some rest before she has to brave her mother at dinner later. 

She even bought new little outfits for Nick, ready to show him off to her entire extended family, cute little button-up shirts that he squirms in a bit, and nice new shoes. He walks a little bit now, so she has started amassing a small collection of shoes for him. There’s only so many outfits she can dress him in—once she has a daughter, she’s sure she’ll go off the deep end with cute little dresses, but for now her baby shoe collection will do. She gets him all dressed up and ready, even though tonight is just a small gathering, her and her mom and siblings. May as well have him look nice.

“There’s my little boy,” her mother greets them, immediately grabbing Nick out of MJ’s arms. Steve suppresses a laugh as Nick immediately starts crying, a panicked “mama!” as he is ripped out of his mom’s arms, and after a few seconds Carolyn passes him back. 

“You’re okay, mama’s right here.” MJ kisses his forehead. He quiets down, placing a finger in his mouth and leaning his head against her shoulder. She’d be lying if she said she didn’t get a tiny kick out of his rejection of his grandmother. She quells that thought quickly. 

Nick is truly the star of the show, though he’s in constant competition with Richard. The oldest Gardner sibling is in the navy, so he’s a rare guest at family gatherings, and while MJ has sent him pictures of Nick, she’s thrilled that they finally get to meet in person. But her mother can never shut up about how proud she is of Richard, and his service and his sacrifices, and MJ finds it all a bit dramatic and exhausting, so she’s glad Nick provides enough of a distraction to lower her mother’s usual dramatics by at least 50%.

Everything goes smoothly, with only one small hiccup at the dinner table, when Maggie innocently asks “so how’s it going with the adoption stuff?”

It’s not her fault, she has no idea, and to be fair even MJ doesn’t know exactly where everything stands on that front as far as her mother is concerned. All she knows is when she last brought it up, Carolyn didn’t sound entirely enthused about the concept, and MJ hasn’t brought it up since for fear of how her mom might react. But now she’s stuck.

“Um, it’s fine, we’ve submitted all our paperwork and now we’re just, uh, waiting. Could be a while.”

She can’t tell if her mother does seem annoyed or if she’s just reading too far into everything, but as MJ shoves another forkful of potato into her mouth she hears the response.

“Oh, you’re going through with that?”

She freezes a little, looking at Nick beside her in the high chair for some reason she doesn’t quite understand. He’s oblivious to the tension, his hands stained orange from the boiled carrots he’s munching on intently.

“Yes, we’re adopting. We want Nick to have a little sister,” MJ says, quietly but firmly. She’s not inviting arguments. Steve says nothing, busying himself wiping Nick’s face to avoid the tension of this conversation.

“I see.”

“He’s so cute when he eats, I feel like I could watch him forever,” Stephanie jumps in, clearly trying to change the subject. MJ looks over at her with visible gratitude.

“Cute, and very, very messy. I don’t know how he even eats anything with how much food he gets on himself. And the floor.”

Stephanie laughs, a little too forcefully, but it’s fine. They are experts at deflecting from tension, the Gardner kids. It’s a well-practiced skill.

Having a baby is also an excellent excuse to leave things early. She does try to stay a bit longer after dessert, but Nick falls asleep in her arms, dozing peacefully against her shoulder, and she decides that’s as good a reason as any to say her goodbyes and head back to the hotel. Everyone takes their turns giving Nick a little goodbye, waking him (much to MJ’s quiet annoyance). She’s definitely nervous that if she ends up in a room alone with her mother, that she’s going to try and bring up the adoption thing again, maybe start an argument, so MJ avoids it skillfully, and soon enough she’s on her way. They’ll be together again tomorrow anyways, for Christmas Eve mass, so she needs to make sure the peace is maintained.

“That was kind of nice,” she admits to Steve as they climb into their rental car. He nods.

“It was.”

“Just hope it stays that way.”

Steve smiles. “Who can be mad when this guy is around?” He motions towards Nick in the backseat with his head.

“Excuse me, I kept the mood up with my infectious positivity.” Her tone is biting, turning to stare at Steve, her eyes playful.

“I’m pretty sure he did that, but maybe he gets it from you.”

MJ snorts. “If he got positivity from one of us, I don’t think it was me.”

“That’s probably true.”

\--

It’s not even 7 am yet, but of course Nick is up, so MJ and Steve are too. But it’s bizarrely warm for December—so warm that they sit out on the balcony, bundled up in sweaters. Nick sits in Steve’s lap, a plastic fake keychain rattling around in his hands, as MJ and Steve sip terrible hotel room coffee. MJ is unusually exhausted, and she half considers trying to get a little more sleep and leaving Nick with Steve for a bit, but it’s also so nice out here with them, and she can’t bring herself to get out of this chair.

And then her cell rings.

It’s too early for anyone to be calling unless it’s an emergency, and her heart rate jumps a little bit as she runs into the room to grab it, flipping it open as she heads back towards the balcony.

“Hello?”

“Hi, is this Mrs. Healy?”

She gives Steve a look of uncertainty. He’s watching her intently.

“Yes, this is her.”

Nick drops his toy, and Steve bends over to pick it up before he starts making noise.

“Hi, good morning. This is Susie from Catholic Family Services.” MJ tries to mouth “Catholic Family Services” to Steve, but she’s not sure if the message gets across, and she’s still trying to listen to what she’s hearing. “We’re calling with an unusual opportunity today, but, well, we’re looking for a home, ideally a permanent one, for a nine-month-old girl. We’re hoping someone could take her in immediately.”

MJ’s eyes are wide, and Steve is trying to signal for her to explain what’s happening, but she can’t.

“Um,” she stammers, unsure of what questions even need to be asked. “Immediately, like, today?”

“Well, within the next few days. She’s in our care now until we bring her to child protective services, but the mother brought her to us and we were hoping we might be able to find a more permanent home for her instead. So we can keep her for a short while, while you ready your home for her, but… the sooner the better.”

MJ nods, forgetting they can’t see her. “Um, okay. She’s nine months?”

“Yes, and she’s African-American. She comes from a difficult situation. A very young mom. She’s likely experienced some neglect. We’d love to be able to give her a loving home right away, help her adjust and recover from difficult early months without being shuttled around to different foster homes. We understand this is a huge decision, and it’s the holidays, but-”

“No, no, thank you for calling. I’m, um, going to talk to my husband, and I’ll call you back very soon, okay?”

“Oh, okay. You’re considering it?” The woman sounds almost surprised, and MJ’s brow furrows.

“Yes. I mean, I think so. Yes.” She takes in a shaky breath. “I’ll call back.” 

“Okay, thank you so much. And happy holidays.”

“You too.”

She clicks her phone shut with force, exhaling loudly. “Holy shit, Steve.” The second word is only mouthed, MJ stealing a glance towards Nick, who is oblivious to the sudden tension in the air. 

“What was that?”

“They asked if we want to adopt a nine-month-old girl. Like… now.”

Steve doesn’t answer immediately. He stares at Nick in his lap, watching him furiously suck on a plastic key. 

“Well.”

MJ takes a seat next to him, fiddling with her phone in her hands. She’s not sure what to say, or think, or do. But more importantly, she can’t shake the feeling settling in her stomach that she wants this.

Steve clears his throat. “What are you thinking,” he prods, and she keeps clicking her phone open and shut, her hands tense. 

“I don’t know,” she lies. She’s almost scared to look at him. “I guess I’m thinking… would it be crazy to say yes?”

He inhales. 

“No. I don’t think it’s crazy.”

Her head tilts upwards, relief visible on her face. “Oh. Thank god. Because… I don’t know. I think this might be right.”

“Right.” He nods a little, and Nick smiles up at him at the movement, giggling. Steve smiles back.

“It’s just… it’s Christmas, and this feels like…” The words are practically whispered. “Divine intervention or something.”

Steve chuckles. “You’re always so religious when you want to be.” She smiles, lips tight, giving him a look.

“I’m serious. Catholic Family Services is calling us on Christmas Eve to see if we can take in a baby. That just seems like… something.”

Steve’s not sure if he believes in destiny, or divine intervention, but he can’t deny that something about this feels like it’s calling out to them. They stare at each other in silence for a bit. 

She has tried so many times to steer herself away from this way of thinking, the idea that God is carefully mapping out aspects of her life. It tends to just make her upset, leave her wondering why she has been dealt so much pain in the past. But life has been so good to her lately. Well, good and bad—Nick was the best thing that ever happened to her, but he came with pain too. And yet, what if that pain, the loss of her fertility, what if it was part of this plan? What if it was all meant to bring her to this moment? She can’t help but let that thought bury into her chest, digging itself deep into her heart.

“Alright,” Steve states, his voice certain. “If you want to do this, then I want to do this.”

She can practically hear her heart beating. 

“I want to do this.”

“Well, call them back.”

\--

Steve is already packing their stuff up when MJ calls and tells them yes, they are willing to adopt, and yes they can come meet her tonight or tomorrow, they just have to fly back. And get another crib, and another high chair, and do about nine thousand other things, but sure, they’ll be there as soon as possible.

“Mama?” Nick asks, concerned, as she hangs up the phone. He seems to be catching on to the fact that the mood has shifted from joy to tension in a very short period of time. She lifts him up, holding him against her hip, and places a kiss against the top of his head.

“It’s okay, pumpkin, don’t worry.” Nick babbles something, joyful once more, and they head back into the room, watching Steve furiously shove things into their bags. 

“I got us a flight,” he tells her, not looking up. “In five hours.”

“Oh, perfect.” MJ sighs a little. “I need to call my mother.”

Steve pauses. “Good luck,” he mutters, glancing at her. She needs it. 

She sits on the bed, Nick crawling away from her, as she dials her mom’s number. The screen tells her it’s only 8:30, but she should be up.

“Hello?”

“Hi, mom.” She doesn’t even bother to try and keep her tone casual. She knows this is not going to go over well, and she just has to accept it. “I have bad news. Well, it’s great news, but…”

“What is it?”

MJ chews her lip. “We got a call today with an adoption opportunity, a little girl who needs a home right away, and we’re going to do it. We’re going to adopt her.”

“Oh.” There’s a brief silence. “So does that mean-?”

“It means we’re heading home right away, so we won’t be able to be at Christmas. I’m sorry, mom. But this is just… it feels right, and we want to be able to do this.”

“I see.” MJ tries to stay calm, tries not to get angry at the lack of understanding. “Well, hopefully you’ll grace us with your presence next year.”

She’s not sure why she even bothers trying to explain herself, knowing it’s probably a lost cause, but she does. “Mom, this is just a really big deal. We want this very badly. And it’s Christmas, and a baby girl needs a home, and we can give her one. You get that, right?”

“Yes.” MJ doesn’t think she believes her, but there’s nothing more to say. 

“I love you, mom. We all do. Me and Steve and Nick. And we will see you very soon. You’ll have to come meet your new granddaughter.” Her tone is saddened, and Steve looks up at her once more, flashing a sympathetic smile. She nods.

“Bye, Mary Jane. Merry Christmas.” The phone clicks off, and MJ exhales, closing her eyes.

“Hey.” Steve has stopped his packing, taking a second to sit next to her on the bed. He hugs her tightly, rubbing his hand on her back, and she leans into his shoulder. “MJ, this is a good thing. This is good. You know that, right?”

She nods against him. “I do.”

He pulls away, wanting to be able to see her face, reassure her with his eyes. 

“Tomorrow, we’re going to have a daughter. On Christmas. Another baby.”

She nods. “I know. I know.” She stands up again. She does know it. She knows how badly she wants this, that this is all she’s thought about for months. It’s not remotely how she’d planned it—not even close—and yet she knows deep in her bones it’s what she wants. Even if her mother can’t understand it. She’s ready to welcome this baby girl, love her with everything she has.

At least she hopes she is.

“Okay. Let’s get going.”


	20. December 24, 2002

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MJ and Steve bring home their daughter.

The flight home is a nightmare. 

They fly through snowy weather that rocks the plane endlessly, the turbulence making both MJ and Nick very stressed. She keeps trying to distract him with a pink stuffed rabbit she bought in the airport as a gift for their new daughter, dancing it in front of him, flopping its ears playfully, but every time they hit a fresh patch of turbulence she is momentarily breathless. Finally Steve realizes she’s shaking, and takes Nick into his own lap, leaving MJ to spend the rest of the flight with her eyes squeezed tightly shut, gripping the seat.

She’s starting to think this was a really bad idea.

It’s probably just the overall anxiety—about this flight, about her mother, about Nick’s crying, about the adoption—convincing her that everything is terrible, but it doesn’t matter. Once the thought has entered her mind, it settles onto her chest like a brick, and she can’t get enough air into her lungs. She tries to calm herself down, but she can’t stop wondering if she has agreed to something very stupid. Not that she can’t back out if she wants to, the social worker promised them that they can still change their minds, but now she’s uprooted everything, and she’s agreed to take in this little baby who is probably terrified, who’s been separated from her mother, who likely will be absolutely traumatized—

“MJ, take a breath,” she hears whispered beside her. She opens her eyes to see Steve staring at her with concern, and she tries to give him a reassuring smile to show she’s okay, but it’s weak. “It’s going to be okay.”

“What, the flight or our absolutely insane decision?”

“Both.” Steve rubs her shoulder. “And it’s not insane.”

“Sure.” She closes her eyes again, but he leaves a hand on her thigh, rubbing it comfortingly, enough to slow her trembling a little, until finally they land.

\--

They’re out of the airport by 2pm, landed in Bridgeport, MJ rushing to retrieve their car from the airport parking, one hand holding Nick to her hip and the other her phone to her ear while Steve retrieves their luggage. She speaks breathlessly to Catholic Family Services as she speed walks, telling them they’re going to pick up a crib from a friend and then they’ll be right there, Nick punctuating the conversation with a confused “mama?” as they travel through the airport at a frantic pace. 

She drums her fingers against the counter as the parking attendant explains he can’t give her any refund even though they paid for parking for four more days, and she doesn’t bother arguing, determined to just get in her car. They have too much to do. 

She gets Nick into his carseat in the back and pulls up to pick up Steve, who is standing by an exit with their bags, and together they shove their luggage into the trunk and take off. 

“You called them?” He asks.

“Yep.”

“And told them we’d be there today?”

“Yep.”

“So we should drop our stuff off at home, then go get the crib and the high chair from Courtney, and then we’ll go?”

“Yep.”

He bites his lip, reading her silence.

“You okay?”

“Yep.”

“MJ, it’s okay if you’re nervous, I’m scared shitless.”

She cracks a little smile, but it fades quickly. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

“You can.” Her hands twitch. “I know you can, and we can, and our house is going to be so full of love, and any kid is lucky to have a mom like you. Okay?”

“Okay,” she lies. She can’t stop thinking that maybe she isn’t cut out for this. She’d wanted a newborn for a reason—she knows how to do that. What she doesn’t know is if she can give that same love to a nine-month-old she’s never met, but who tonight will be sleeping in her house as her daughter.

Her daughter.

She had eight months to prepare for Nick’s arrival into her life, and she’s had less than a day to prepare for her daughter’s. And though Nick’s first weeks at home certainly had their challenges, she knows this will bring a host of new ones. This baby girl has already had a difficult time, according to Catholic Family Services, and now she’s been ripped from her home and will be placed in a strange new one, with strangers. MJ has to show her she’s safe, and loved, and that she’ll protect her no matter what. She has to convince her that she’s her mother now. 

She hopes she’s up for it.

\--

They leave Nick with Courtney, who promises to bring him back to their place in a few hours, before giving MJ and Steve a big grin and a “good luck!” that makes MJ a bit sick to her stomach. They stop back at home, unloading and re-assembling the crib, and the high chair. The house’s third bedroom is currently set up as Steve’s home office, not ready to be turned into a second nursery, and while she thinks she’ll eventually put both the kids in the same room, MJ decides putting the crib in her and Steve’s bedroom might make the most sense for the first few nights anyways. After all, she doesn’t plan on letting her new baby out of her site. And it’ll help baby feel safe. 

They’re back where they were when Nick was born, when they hadn’t yet picked a name and were stuck referring to him only as “baby.” Now their daughter is “baby,” except it occurs to MJ suddenly as she sits in the car on the way to meet her that she already has a name. She just has no idea what it is. Wouldn’t that have been pertinent information for the social worker to share at some point? 

They can change it, she knows, as was made clear to them in one of their sessions on older adoptions, where they explained it can be a good way for new parents to connect with their children, welcome them into their new homes and feel like part of the family. Yet another thing for them to think about today, she thinks as she watches the building come into her field of vision, coming closer and closer. She swallows thickly, feeling dizzy, her heart pounding loudly in her chest. Steve looks at her after he pulls up in front of the building, turning the car off, and she stares back, eyes a little frantic. 

He grabs her hand, nodding. “I know.” His hand is sweaty in hers, and trembling, and she squeezes it.

“Okay. We can do this.” She’s not sure who she’s trying to convince, but she takes a deep breath and steps out of the car, placing her hands squarely on her hips. They walk in side by side, and she can hear Steve breathing more heavily than normal, his nerves kicking in with gusto. Susie the social worker is waiting for them in the lobby, and gives them a warm smile. 

“The Healys!” She exclaims, nodding. “You guys are all set up at home now?”

“Yes,” Steve says simply as they both nod. 

“Great! Let’s go meet new baby!” She’s doing the “baby” thing too, MJ notes as they turn a corner, and she decides to just ask.

“What’s her name?”

“Well, you are welcome to give her a name of your own choosing, but her name at birth is Frances.”

MJ almost giggles. “That’s my grandmother’s name.” Then that thought sinks in a bit further—kind of a beautiful coincidence, especially considering it can’t be a very common name these days. Her grandmother, the one she was closest to growing up, who she wishes could have met her children.

“That’s sweet,” Susie smiles. Steve looks at MJ, eyes still incredibly nervous. “You guys ready?”

“Yes.” MJ’s answer comes out surprisingly firmly, as she feels something shift in her, feels her mental state cross from overwhelming nerves to certainty, her heart rate slowing. Like when she first held Nick after her surgery and could no longer feel her own pain, because all that mattered was her baby. Next to her, she hears Steve practically hyperventilating, but she is calm, resolute. She needs to be a mom right now. She places a comforting hand on her husband’s lower back.

A young woman sits in the room in sweatpants, clearly having been called in to work despite the holidays, and MJ has no idea why she notices this before she notices the baby. Then the woman stands, and suddenly Frances is all she can see, her hands curled into tight little fists, her eyes looking a little sleepy, a shoe on one foot and the other kicked off onto the floor. She locks eyes with MJ as she approaches, fear on her face, so MJ walks slower, giving her the best comforting smile she can. Frances is passed to her, and though she worries for a second she might cry or try to claw her way out of her arms, she doesn’t. She softens into her embrace, MJ holding her to her chest, breathing her in.

“Hi, babygirl,” she murmurs, and Frances closes her eyes a little, melting further into her. MJ kisses the top of her head. “Hi angel.”

Steve is still at the door, watching them intently. MJ turns to him, letting Frances meet his eyes too, and MJ takes her hand and gives him a tiny wave. “Can you say hi to daddy?”

Steve waves back, and takes a small step forward, smiling nervously. It’s as if he’s taken on all the nerves that MJ has suddenly shaken off, but then again that’s just how she is, always finding a strange bravery from somewhere deep within when someone needs her. So Steve is content, for this moment, to just watch her hold their daughter. He remembers seeing her hold Nick for the very first time, watching her hold their son after years of wanting to be a mom more than anything. That was special, but this is too, in a new and somehow different way. He feels like he could watch this moment forever.

“You lost your shoe,” MJ whispers, leaning down to pick it up off the floor. She seems to be oblivious to the other two women in the room. “Can we put your shoe back on?” She pulls it over her curled toes, and suddenly Frances lets out a little giggle that makes MJ’s heart swell beyond belief. “Oh! See, that’s better, isn’t it.”

Steve seems to unfreeze at that, stepping towards them, and MJ places Frances into his arms, even though some part of her wants to hold her in her arms for the rest of her life and never let go. But she watches as Steve takes her, holds her, a little less naturally than MJ but still with a visible paternal love that always makes her feel hopelessly in love with him. She can’t stop grinning.

“Hello Frances,” he greets her, and she makes a little noise, almost like a laugh. 

And in this moment they know, without question, that this is right.

\--

Nick is very confused when he arrives home.

He makes his uncertainty known, chatty as always, as they introduce him to Frances, his new sister. He babbles at her as they sit together on the floor, receiving no response from her at all. She is eternally quiet, which seems to make him even more confused. 

MJ can’t blame him, and she does wish she’d had more time to prepare him for the fact that he suddenly was going to lose his status as the baby of the house, but instead all she can do is sit with the two of them on the floor, helping them share a bin of blocks and an assortment of tiny musical instruments and toys. Frances is hesitant, fiddling with things nervously and uncertainly, but as MJ presses keys and buttons in front of her, she starts to mimic, until eventually she’s brave enough to start doing things on her own. But mostly, she just watches Nick, takes in what he’s doing, and there’s something magical about seeing her start to copy her older brother too. 

Steve returns from the store with bags in hand, certainly full of toys and stuffed animals. “They didn’t have much left,” he explains, which was to be expected of shopping for children’s toys on December 24th at almost 5pm. But it is Christmas tomorrow, and they suddenly have another child to give presents to, so Steve did his best to pick out as many little things as he could for her. She’s already been given the airport bunny, a little welcome to the family gift that she cuddled the whole drive home. 

MJ doesn’t want to let Frances out of her sight, so Steve lugs the bags upstairs by himself, before joining them in the living room. He sits on the couch, and MJ wants to join him, but she can hardly even bring herself to take a step back from her two children, playing together with care, if a little confused. But Steve gives her a little scratch on the back to signal he wants her, so she cautiously stands, and steps towards the couch, watching closely to make sure Frances doesn’t react to her slight departure. She curls against Steve’s side, his arm wrapping around her to pull her in close as they watch their two babies on the carpet.

“We have a daughter,” MJ whispers. She needs to hear the words out loud to help them sink in, because today feels like a fever dream. 

“I know.” 

He kisses her cheek.

“The name…” MJ starts.

“Yeah, it’s... “

“I don’t like it,” she confesses, and Steve laughs.

“I know.”

“But I also… she’s lost so much, and do we really want to take her name, too?”

He thinks about this for a moment. “Maybe we can keep it, but make it our own.”

MJ sits up a little straighter. “What are you thinking?” 

“Like we could give her a fun nickname, and a new middle name. That way we can name her ourself, and still let her keep her birth name. And your grandmother’s name.”

MJ smiles. “I like that.” She runs Frances over in her mouth a few times, letting it sit on her tongue. “What are nicknames for Frances? Besides Franny. Somehow I don’t think she’s a Franny.”

“Probably because she is nine months old and not 84.”

“We could call her Frankie,” MJ says suddenly. “It’s cute, and not an old lady name.”

“Oh!” He looks over at her on the carpet, her hands pushing keys on the tiny piano toy. “Frankie. I like that.”

“Me too.”

“And we can take our time with a middle name,” he promises, giving her shoulder a squeeze.

MJ is starting to ache with separation again, so she slides back to the floor, scooting back towards the little play area. Frankie looks up at her as she rejoins them, eyes a little curious. MJ can’t help but remember that Frankie still has no clue what’s going on. As much as she’s been trying to refer to herself as mama as much as she can—probably too much—she’s still a stranger to this confused little girl. A stranger she seems to like, thankfully, but a stranger nonetheless.

She has a lifetime to bond with her, to build the mother-daughter relationship she’s dreamed of for years, so she tries not to let it phase her that it’ll probably take some time for Frankie to understand that she’s her mother now. It’s still a strange thought, though. 

“Can mama have a block?” She asks, motioning to the small pile of colourful wooden shapes in front of Frankie on the rug. Frankie looks at her, unsure, but doesn’t protest as MJ reaches out slowly and picks one up. Frankie has one in her hand, and she watches observantly as MJ holds one too, still silent. And then she reaches her tiny hands out, extending her arms towards her mother, offering her the block in her hands. 

“Oh, thank you!” She exclaims, and Frankie smiles a little, pleased with herself. “Here, mama will trade you.” She hands Frankie the one she’d picked up from the pile, and she takes it gratefully, looking it over in her hands. Nick scoots over, babbling at her a little questioningly. 

“Toy?” He asks, and MJ nods at him. 

“Yes, here’s one for you.” She passes one to him too, and he looks at it for a second before dropping it. Of course. He’s not actually interested in the toy, just wants the same treatment from mom. She sighs a little. 

“This is a glimpse at the next twenty years of our life,” Steve says from behind her, and she laughs.

“Something to look forward to.”

\--

The day passes, if not perfectly, much more smoothly than they would have expected. Feeding is a little bit complicated—they’ve gone from one mouth to feed, to two, and now she has to figure out breast milk and formula and bottle feeding and food for two babies with a seven month age difference. But she gets Frankie to eat some boiled veggies, which feels like enough of a win for one day considering how hesitant she is, and then MJ puts Nick to bed while giving Steve a little time with Frankie. She certainly does not seem as trusting of him as she is of MJ, a thought that he tries not to be too hurt by. But no matter what he does, she won’t relax with him, whining and trying to crawl free until MJ eventually returns. 

“She’s not my biggest fan,” he says quietly, as Frankie crawls into MJ’s lap. 

“We’ll get there.” Frankie motions that she wants to be picked up, and MJ holds her against her chest, rubbing a hand over back.

“She certainly likes you.” It’s just an observation, and she hopes he isn’t upset by it.

“It’s probably just because I’m a woman.” He nods, but he knows it’s also because she’s so, so good at this. But she’s right. They’ll get there. They have all the time in the world. 

“I’m going to go wrap some presents, if you two want to go to bed.” She nods, standing with Frankie still glued to her chest. This is the part she’s most worried about—getting her to sleep. This could go very badly.

And quickly, she realizes this is, in fact, not going to be easy. She puts Frankie in an old onesie of Nick’s, and she cuddles with her in her own bed for a while, dreading the moment where she puts her in the crib. Somehow she just has a bad feeling about that. She watches as Frankie lies on her back, MJ running her finger up and down her little arm, seeing her grow sleepier. Finally, her eyes close, and MJ lets her sleep there a little bit longer, to make sure she’s really out, before she gently picks her up and goes to lay her in the crib. 

But the second she lays her down, and takes a step back, there come the tears. She quickly leans forward and picks her up again, clutching her tightly.

“Shhhh, you’re okay, mama’s still here.” She quiets down pretty quickly, sucking her thumb, but now they’re stuck, because MJ knows the second she puts her back down in the crib she’ll cry again. She sits down on the edge of the bed, rocking her in her arms, trying to tire her out. Soon enough, she can tell by her breathing that she has drifted off in her arms, so again she goes to place her down.

And again, she wakes immediately, crying out in fear. It’s a cry she never heard from Nick, one that kind of scares her, a deeply anguished and terrified wail that has her immediately reaching out for her again. She glances at the alarm clock on her bedside—it’s already 9pm, way past the time she should be asleep. She heads back to the bed, and once again lays Frankie down beside her, and watches her drift off quickly. This time, she doesn’t bother trying to move her, but lets her sleep there, watching endlessly. The rise and fall of her daughter’s little chest, her breathing. She really doesn’t want to hear that cry again, to see that desperate fear that makes MJ feel like she has abandoned and terrified her, and yet she doesn’t how to communicate to this little girl that she isn’t going to abandon her, that she’s here to protect her. For now, she’ll have to just content her with the comfort of getting to lie next to this new strange woman who she seems to trust implicitly, and get some sleep.

And suddenly, MJ is being nudged awake by Steve, and she realizes she drifted off in bed with her. Not the safest thing, she knows, but at least Frankie and her are both getting some sleep. 

“Sorry,” she apologizes quickly. “She didn’t like the crib.” He nods understandingly.

“Go get ready for bed.” She slides ever so carefully out of bed, trying not to wake Frankie, and it seems to work, allowing her a brief moment to slide on some pyjamas and brush her teeth. 

“Should we try the crib again?” Steve asks, and MJ isn’t sure, but she steels herself and picks Frankie up one more time. She feels her wake as she lifts her, and sure enough the second she starts to be lowered down into the crib, the crying starts. Fuck. 

She looks over at the bed, unsure, before suddenly reaching out to hand her to Steve for a moment. “Here, give me a second.” He takes her, and her crying gets a little quieter, without stopping entirely. Steve rocks her gently.

MJ lowers the barrier of the crib, opening up the side, and pushes it towards her side of the bed, glueing them together. She reaches to take Frankie once more, running a hand over her cheek. 

“See, you can sleep with mama now.” She lays down on the bed, and slowly places Frankie into her crib, never breaking contact. Frankie lies beside MJ, who curls up and faces her, Frankie wrapping her hand around MJ’s index finger, squeezing. “We can sleep together.”

She feels Steve climb in beside her, but doesn’t turn away from Frankie. 

“Steve,” she whispers.

“Yeah?”

“What do you think of Mary?”

“Frances Mary?”

“Or Mary Frances.”

He laughs. “After you?”

“No! After… you know… the virgin Mary.”

“Oh.” Of course she’s going to pick something religious, he thinks. One kid after St. Nick, and the other after the blessed mother. 

“Just because, you know, Christmas. Our little Christmas Eve baby.” She feels a little stupid now that she’s saying it out loud, but if she were to turn around she’d see Steve smile.

“It always comes back to Christmas, huh.”

“We don’t have to-”

“No!” He says, maybe a little too loudly. “No, I love it. I think it’s beautiful.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, good.” She feels Frankie’s grip on her finger relax a little. “My mother will be so pleased I named her something biblical.” 

“Never thought I’d do theme names for my kids, but…”

MJ laughs. “They’re not theme names. If they happen to both be related to Christmas, then so be it.”

“Whatever you say,” he grins from behind her. 

Frankie’s hand falls away from her, but MJ leaves her hand extended in the crib, beside her. She wants to feel close to her. That way, when Frankie wakes up in the night, she’ll see that her new mom is still here.

Eventually, they both drift off like this. Side by side.


	21. March to May 2003

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The kids play favourites. Carolyn doesn't meet her granddaughter. Frankie gets sick.

Steve tries not to let it get to him that Frankie doesn’t seem to like him.

She’s obsessively attached to MJ, glued to her side at all times, anxious if she’s separated from her for even a moment. Nick was attached to her too of course, when he was younger, but not to this level. She’s so clingy, MJ feels like she hasn’t had a moment to herself since Christmas. 

And meanwhile, Steve gets tolerant acceptance at best, or complete rejection at worst. Luckily, Nick has recently become obsessed with him, which takes a bit of the hurt away, but still. It’s a tough thing to face.

It’s tough on both of them. Steve, who can’t help but feel like a terrible father, or like he’s somehow untrustworthy, or that his kids just don’t love him as much as they love MJ. MJ, who is a little overwhelmed with caring for two children under the age of two, one of whom demands her attention 24/7, and the other who seems to be drifting away from her as she is torn in another direction. 

A book tells her to start doing a family cuddle hour, so they do, where all four of them climb into mommy and daddy’s bed. This way, she figures she gets to spend some quality time with Nick, while Frankie can spend some with Steve, and no one feels left behind. But then it comes time to put them to bed, and Nick looks up at her with questioning eyes and asks “sleep mama’s bed?” Because of course, Frankie sleeps in their room, and Nick gets left alone in his nursery. 

“You sleep in your own room, like a big boy, and your sister sleeps here because she’s not a big girl yet.” Nick nods understandingly. 

She’s been pushing the crib a little farther from her bed each night, but Frankie still wakes and cries in the middle of the night. The nights are long. Steve sometimes tries to get up and calm her, when she wakes up, but she normally won’t quiet until she’s in MJ’s arms once more.

They love both of their children endlessly. But they are so, so tired.

Courtney asks MJ if she’s going to throw a first birthday party for Frankie in March, like she did for Nick, and with overwhelming guilt she realizes the thought hadn’t even occurred to her. The things that she took for granted when she only had one child—throwing cute parties, reading the occasional book, having sex with her husband—seem like fantasies now that she has two, and one who needs so much from her. And she wants to be able to give her everything she needs. But she’s struggling to stay afloat.

They do make a big deal of Frankie’s first birthday. It feels like a momentous occasion, and MJ lets Steve do all the birthday shopping and give her every single gift himself. Frankie really seems to enjoy the gift giving process, more the act of ripping paper off of boxes than the gifts themselves, and as they reach the end of the small assortment of toys he bought for her, Steve starts re-wrapping the gifts with the discarded paper over and over again so she can continue tearing it off with glee. MJ sits back, scooting farther and farther from them. Frankie is so enthralled in her game that she doesn’t seem to notice mom backing away slightly, and MJ could burst as she watches Steve finally seem to connect with her in the way they’ve both been hoping for. Little victories.

“Do you wanna show Nick your new toys?” Steve nudges a box towards her, a xylophone, and she looks up to her brother sitting in another high chair, and she reaches for the box.

“Nick,” she says. 

Steve’s head whips around to MJ, as if to confirm she heard it too, and she grins back at him. Frankie’s been babbling a lot more lately, a nice change from her shy silence when she first came home with them, but they haven’t heard words yet. 

“Nick!” Steve repeats, and she says it back to him once more. 

“Nick!”

“Fankie,” Nick responds, and MJ’s laughter rings out through the room. 

“Guess that’s a good way to deal with the ‘mama’ versus ‘dada’ question,” she muses. 

They take pictures of the birthday girl as she eats the tiny piece of cake they let her have, icing smeared across her face. MJ’s been sending pictures of her to her mom, since she still hasn’t come down to meet her, a fact that MJ tries not to think about too much. She’ll come eventually, she’s sure, and when she does she’ll fall in love with Frankie. How can she not?

They sleep with Frankie in their room that night, but MJ has promised it’s the last night of this. The crib is now pressed firmly against the wall, and Frankie can sleep for the most part without MJ holding her hand. Tomorrow, they’ll try to get her in her own room.

\--

In May, the flu rips through the Healy house. Well, Steve remains untouched—he’d told MJ once when they were first dating that he never gets sick, and so far he has yet to be proven wrong. But the Sunday after her birthday, MJ starts feeling sick, and then the next morning, she notices Nick isn’t feeling so hot either, and later that day Frankie starts showing signs that she’s been hit too.

On Monday, the three of them lay in bed together all day, MJ putting anything she can think of on the TV to keep the kids entertained enough to not require too much attention from her, and maybe even let her get a bit more sleep. Steve heads right to the bedroom when he returns from work at the end of the day, smiling when he sees Nick and Frankie halfheartedly watching the end of Elmo in Grouchland as MJ dozes beside them, not waking when he enters.

But his smile fades when he hears Frankie cough, a wheezing, painful cough he doesn’t like the sound of. He listens to her carefully, in the doorway. The movie is quiet, and he can hear that her breathing sounds a little louder than usual, more laboured. Poor girl. He goes to sit on the edge of the bed and scoops her up, holding her in his arms, and she feels heavier than normal, clearly exhausted. Nick doesn’t seem this bad, and neither does MJ, but Frankie is burning up in his arms. His anxiety mounts a little.

MJ stirs as he sits, smiling at the sight of him holding Frankie. “Hi, honey,” she greets him. 

“How ya feeling?”

“Shi- Bad.” She catches herself before she swears, and he gives a little chuckle.

“This young lady sounds like she’s not feeling well at all.” He rubs Frankie’s back comfortingly.

“Oh?”

“She’s got a bit of a wheeze. I’m a little worried about her breathing.”

MJ sits up, and it’s a true testament to how exhausted Frankie must be that she doesn’t even try to ask to be held by mom. She just lays against Steve’s chest, breathing ragged. 

“Uh oh.” MJ doesn’t like the sound of that at all. “We’ll keep our eye on it, I guess.” She gets up to grab a thermometer, and takes her own temperature, and then Nick’s, and finally Frankie’s, and sure enough she has a much higher temperature than her mother or brother. Still, MJ and Steve try not to worry. It’s just a flu.

She decides to let Frankie sleep in their bed that night, wanting to be close to her, and then Nick wants to sleep with them too, so next thing she knows she’s curled up at 8pm, drifting off with her two kids beside her. There’s barely enough room for Steve when he joins them, but they make it work, their little family all crammed on to their queen. MJ wakes repeatedly, her mom brain too anxious to let her fully drift off. She keeps checking to make sure Frankie is still breathing okay. Over and over again, MJ wakes, listens closely to Frankie, confirms that she’s still alive, and drifts off again. Eventually, the cycle repeats enough that it’s finally morning.

\--

On Tuesday morning, Frankie can barely sit in her high chair. She’s so lethargic her body won’t support her enough to sit up, so MJ holds her against her chest while Nick eats. At least he seems to be feeling markedly better. 

Frankie, on the other hand, won’t eat anything. MJ can get her to take a few tiny sips of water, and nothing more. She’s starting to worry. She seemed really sick yesterday, but somehow today she’s even worse. And she’s burning up in MJ’s arms.

She tries to tell herself she’s being over dramatic as she lays with Frankie on the couch, while Nick constructs a small tower of blocks on the floor in front of them, but as she listens to her breathing she could swear the pauses in between breaths are getting longer and longer, as if it’s getting harder and harder for her to keep taking in air. And that definitely scares her. 

“Oh, you really don’t feel good, huh,” MJ murmurs sympathetically. “Come here, honey bunny.” She lifts her up and holds her closer, trying to listen carefully. She looks as though she’s having a tough time even holding her head up. And then MJ’s heart stops: Frankie isn’t taking another breath. There’s a moment that feels like an eternity where she isn’t breathing in again, where it has just stopped, and then finally she takes in another one. But that was not good, and as MJ stares at her she realizes her lips are developing a bluish tinge. Fuck. 

She leaps into action, Frankie clutched tightly to her chest, grabbing the phone. She starts to dial Steve’s cell, before changing her mind and calling Courtney, her own breathing growing shallower.

“Hi,” she says as soon as it stops ringing, not waiting for any greeting. “I think I need to take Frankie to the hospital, can I bring Nick to your place on the way?”

“Of course.” MJ’s hand is fidgeting as it holds Frankie against her. “Is she okay?”

“She… I don’t know. She’s having trouble breathing. I… I have to go, thanks Courtney, I’ll be there soon.” Nick looks up at her, a little worried, mumbling something about the hospital in concern.

“It’s okay, pumpkin. Just going to take your sister to the doctor to make sure she’s okay, and you’ll get to go play with Madison for a bit, okay?” She’s already trying to get them out the door, fighting to maintain a calm veneer so neither of the kids realize she’s absolutely terrified right now.

“Fankie sick?” He asks, looking over at his sister with worried eyes as MJ crouches to pull his shoes on. 

“Yeah, she’s a little sick, but we’re going to make sure she’s okay.” Nick nods wisely. 

“Sorry Fankie,” he sighs, and MJ would have laughed if she wasn’t busy losing her mind. She rushes them out the door and gets them both settled into the back before it occurs to her she still hasn’t called Steve, so she frantically dials his number as she climbs into the driver’s seat. 

“Hello?”

“Steve, I’m taking her to the hospital,” she spits. “Her… she’s not breathing properly, and she’s… her lips are kind of blue, I-”

“Shit, MJ.” She can hear him moving frantically, no doubt trying to rush out of his office. “Shit. Okay, I’ll be there soon. Okay.”

“See you there.” She flips her phone shut, and takes one last glance back at Frankie to make sure she’s still awake. She is, but her eyes look exhausted, and her breathing is still laboured.

“We’re going to get you taken care of, honey bunny,” she says, though she knows the words are more for herself than Frankie. “You’re going to feel better soon.”

\--

Steve manages to beat MJ to the hospital, standing in the entrance of the emergency room as she comes rushing up with an exhausted Frankie in her arms. They’re quite a sight, Steve in his suit and MJ still in sweatpants and a sweater that is way too bulky for May, her hair falling out of the messy bun she’d slept in. He keeps his hand glued to her lower back, both of them trying to stay calm as Frankie is seen by a paediatrician who quickly diagnoses her with pneumonia. 

And then she is wheeled to a room in the children’s ward, MJ holding her small hand the whole way, struggling to keep up with the rapid pace. They give her a tiny oxygen mask as they settle her into a room, and she’s hooked up to an IV for antibiotics, and fluids, and MJ and Steve stand together, his arm wrapped around her, as they watch the slow rise and fall of her chest in her little hospital crib.

The adrenaline is wearing off, and exhaustion hits MJ like a train, dizzying her. “I need to sit down,” she mutters, stumbling a little towards an armchair and sinking into it. Steve gives one last glance to Frankie, making sure she’s still sleeping, before he follows MJ to the chair and crouches in front of her. She presses a hand against her forehead, trembling a little. 

“She’s going to be okay,” he promises, placing a hand on MJ’s thigh. “We’re alright.”

“She scared the shit out of me,” she whispers. Everything is hitting her now, after having fought so hard to stay calm for her kids, and now the room seems to be spinning around her. “God, I feel sick.”

“Shh, okay, you’re okay.” He reaches up and kisses her forehead, her eyes closing as she grips the arm of her chair. A nurse who looks like she might have graduated last week enters, fiddling with Frankie’s IV for a moment before looking over at MJ leaning backwards in her chair, face pale. 

“Is she okay?” She asks a little loudly, and Steve gives her a look. 

“She’s fine,” he answers, but the nurse can see MJ’s flushed cheeks and shaky hands and gives a bit of a disapproving look.

“She shouldn’t be here if she’s sick,” she says quietly, and MJ’s eyes snap open, fury taking over.

“I’m not leaving my daughter,” she spits, and there’s a tense silence in the room before the nurse gives her one last look and heads back out. But MJ also knows, on some deeper level, that the nurse is right. It’s irresponsible of her to be here when she’s still fighting off her own flu, and so as dinner time approaches and they need to decide who’s going to stay here in the hospital, and who’s going to go get Nick and go home, she knows she has to do the right thing. It doesn’t make it any easier. 

“It’s just one night,” Steve promises, and she nods, her hand still in Frankie’s crib. “You’ll be back first thing in the morning.”

She stares at her daughter, some strange feeling taking hold of her heart, and it occurs to her for the first time that maybe the attachment issues are mutual. 

“I can’t leave her,” she whispers, and suddenly she’s blinking back tears, and Steve wraps her up in his arms, her shoulders heaving as she starts to cry in earnest. 

“I know it’s hard.” She’s taking gasping breaths, sobbing into his chest. “You just have to get through the night. And you need to get some sleep, so you can be ready to be here for her tomorrow. Okay?”

She nods, wiping her eyes. “Okay.”

“Promise you’ll sleep for me. And for her.”

“I’ll try.” He knows it’s easier said than done, that MJ’s insomnia can be killer when she’s stressed, but he also knows she needs to take care of herself—and that’s not something she does well. 

She sits at the wheel of her car for ages before she leaves, her body wracked with fresh sobs, unable to calm herself down. She can’t shake the immense guilt of abandoning her daughter in her time of need, the little girl who panics when she wakes in the night and doesn’t find MJ next to her, who is clearly still traumatized from having been separated from her birth mother. MJ had promised her over and over that she’d never leave her, and now she’s doing exactly that, and the thought of Frankie waking in the middle of the night in a strange room and realizing mama isn’t coming is making her hyperventilate. 

But she needs to go get her son. So she once again pulls herself together, and pulls out of the hospital parking lot.

\-- 

Nick won’t stop crying that night, clearly disturbed by the strange day, and probably catching on a bit to MJ’s underlying anxiety, as much as she’s trying to act like everything’s normal. 

“Fankie?” He asks repeatedly, not understanding why she isn’t here, why she isn’t coming home. Daddy being gone is normal enough, but Frankie’s absence is clearly deeply concerning. 

“She’s with daddy, she’ll be home when she’s feeling better.”

“Sick?” 

“Yes, she’s still sick.” She wishes she had more energy for his questions, but she is upset and worried and still battling her own flu, and it’s all a lot to handle. She gives him a little kiss before leaving him alone in the living room, needing to take a breather. 

She picks up the phone in the kitchen, wanting someone, anyone really, to tell her everything’s okay, but she hesitates before dialling Steve’s cell again. For some reason she doesn’t want to talk to him right now. Instead, she dials her mother’s number.

“Hello?”

“Hi, mom.”

“Oh, Mary Jane!” She’s surprised. “It’s a Tuesday, is everything okay?”

“Frankie is in the hospital,” she says, trying to stave off the tears. “With pneumonia. Steve’s with her, and I’m here at home with Nick, and I… anyways. It’s just hard.”

“Of course.” There’s a bit of silence, as her mother obviously has no idea what to say. “How long do you think she’ll be there?”

“I don’t know. Probably a few days.” MJ sighs. She is kind of hoping her mother will offer to come stay for a bit, look after Nick so MJ can spend more time in the hospital. 

“I’m sure that’s very difficult,” Carolyn says instead. MJ’s chest aches.

“Do you want to come here for a bit, maybe? Finally meet your granddaughter, spend some time with Nick? That way I could have more time with her in the hospital.”

She hears a sigh on the other end of the line. “I don’t know, Mary Jane, it’s very last minute…”

MJ nods, quickly wiping one stray tear from her eye. “Right. Okay.”

“Maybe I’ll come in the summer.”

“Alright.”

“Take care, honey.” She’s clearly ending the conversation, and MJ starts to cry a little more intensely, wanting her to just stay on the line, wanting to ask why she really won’t come, because she knows if she’d told her Nick was in the hospital she’d be halfway to the airport by now. But she doesn’t want to hear the answer, so she just whispers a quick good-bye, and hangs up.

She wipes her eyes and goes back into the living room, where Nick looks up at her nervously. 

“Mommy sad?”

She smiles at him. “Mommy misses Frankie a little bit, yeah, but it’s okay.” She reaches down and scoops him up. 

“No sad,” he says, touching her chest with his hand, and she laughs a little. 

“Okay, I won’t be sad anymore.” 

She walks towards his room, but as they approach he scratches at her chest. “Mama’s bed?” 

She nods. “Sure, you can sleep with me tonight. It’s just the two of us. Daddy is staying with Frankie.”

“Okay,” he answers. Well, maybe this is a positive. Just her and Nick for a bit.

She tries her best to sleep that night, hard as it is. She aches with worry, imagining over and over again Frankie waking up in the middle of the night in a place she doesn’t know, and her not being there to comfort her. But then she looks down and sees Nick peacefully asleep, a thumb in his mouth, and she curls herself around him, holding him against her stomach, and his warmth makes her feel a little less alone.

\--

She calls Steve the second she wakes up in the morning, so desperate to hear that Frankie is doing alright.

“She’s much better,” Steve confirms. “She doesn’t need as much oxygen and they’re saying she can probably go home tomorrow and just do oral antibiotics. And I can tell she doesn’t feel as terrible.”

MJ breathes a sigh of relief. “Oh, thank God.”

“She misses you though.”

She presses her hand to her chest. “I miss her so much. Nick and I will be there really soon.”

“She’ll be happy.”

MJ smiles. “Did she sleep through the night?”

“No,” Steve admits. “She cried, and I tried to calm her down, and she wanted you. But I actually got her to calm down eventually, and she slept in my arms a little bit.”

“Oh!” Her heart warms a bit. “Oh, that’s so good.”

“Did you sleep?”

She laughs. “A little. I missed her too. I’m realizing she’s not the only one with attachment issues.”

“No kidding.” He sighs. “Maybe this was good for you guys. Not Frankie being sick, but a little separation.”

“Yeah.” She knows he’s right, as much as she still aches for her. “But I’m ready for it to be over.”

“Well, you guys get ready and you’ll be here soon. Frankie wants her mama back too.”

MJ nods to herself. “Tell her I can’t wait to see her.”

She smiles a little as she hangs up the phone, Nick trying to climb over her, wanting her to get up with him. Steve is right. This was good, and they both made it. Everything’s going to be okay.


	22. June to July 2003

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Carolyn comes to visit.

When mid-June rolls around, and her mother still hasn’t come to visit, MJ starts to get annoyed. 

It’s been six months. Frankie has become a whole different person since December, grown from a quiet nine-month-old to a vibrant and extremely chatty toddler who cracks her parents up daily with various drama queen antics. They even started leaving the kids with Steve’s parents sometimes so that MJ and Steve could have the occasional date night, and though there are still usually some tears from Frankie when mommy leaves, it’s manageable, ordinary toddler clinginess, nothing they can’t handle. Lately, Steve’s mom has started coming over every Wednesday to look after the kids so that MJ can go out and have a little time to herself. She’s started doing yoga.

And still, no Carolyn. It’s impossible to deny the obvious—that she doesn’t have much of an interest in meeting Frankie. MJ sends her pictures, and receives short replies agreeing that she’s “very cute,” and yet every vaguely dismissive phone call leaves her more and more heartbroken. She knows she just needs to ask her mother to come. She knows. But the words never come out, mostly because she thinks if her offer is rejected again she might finally snap.

She calls her mom on a Sunday evening after two glasses of wine, while Steve is upstairs giving the kids a bath. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she notes how sad it is that she’s terrified to do this, but she bites her lip and sits there while the phone rings, sipping at her third glass,

“Hi, darling!” 

She makes it through some pleasantries, some basic questions, before she chokes out what’s been eating at her.

“Mom, I really, really want you to come visit. Soon. You have a granddaughter you’ve never met, and she’s growing up so fast, and, to be honest, it really upsets me that you haven’t come to see her even once yet. It’s been six months.” The words come pouring out faster than she intends, and the weight of them only hits her once she’s finished. She hadn’t meant to say it like that. She’d planned on being nice.

There’s a tiny bit of silence, and instantly she is so full of regret, fighting the urge to just hang up and down the rest of this bottle of wine. 

“If it upsets you that much, you could have come here, you know.” 

Her regret shifts ever so slightly towards anger, her hands tensing.

“I have two kids under two, mom. You really think I should have to fly to you for you to see your granddaughter?”

“I have a life too, Mary Jane, I don’t just sit around here waiting for your calls, I have things to do-”

“Okay, never mind, I’m sorry I brought it up.” She’s getting angrier by the second and needs to get off this call before she screams, and she’s preparing to hang up when she hears her mother take in a deep breath.

“I can come for the fourth of July,” she sighs, only a slight hint of annoyance in her voice. “If I can get a flight. And a hotel.” 

It’s certainly not the most enthusiastic offer, but she’s ready to take what she can get. And she certainly won’t argue if her mother would rather stay in a hotel, even though she’d been expecting her to want to stay over. “I can help you book everything. Frankie will be so excited to meet you. She’s our little social butterfly now, I’m sure you two will have lots to talk about. She’s not great at words yet but she loves talking.”

“That sounds lovely,” her mother answers, and MJ silently tells herself to stop reading too far into her tone, because she’s just making herself crazy, and yet she can’t help but hear how disingenuine it sounds. “What kind of toys does she like?”

It strikes her as kind of a silly question, and MJ laughs a bit. “Well, she’s 15 months old, she’s not exactly picky. You could give her your keyring and she’d be amused by it all day.” Then she chastises herself a little—this is her mom’s way of making an effort, she realizes. She should appreciate that. “But I’m sure she’d love a new stuffed animal. And she’s really into Winnie the Pooh.”

“Like you used to be.”

“Yeah.” She softens a little. She’d re-decorated Frankie and Nick’s room around the time that Frankie started sleeping in it more, and had given Frankie’s side a whole Winnie the Pooh theme, complete with an old stuffed Tigger and a honey-pot lamp from MJ’s own childhood bedroom. Things Carolyn had bought for MJ that had now been passed down to her granddaughter. For some strange reason, the thought reassures her. This is going to be good. Once she’s gotten her here, everything will work. She’s sure. “I’ll call you tomorrow to talk about flights and everything. Thanks, mom. I’m so excited.”

They say their goodbyes, and she heads upstairs just in time to say a goodnight to the kids as Steve is laying them down. It’s always risky for her to pop in as Frankie is going to sleep—if Frankie doesn’t see her, she’ll usually go to bed without trouble, but once mom has made an appearance she doesn’t really like her to leave. But tonight it seems okay: she gives Frankie and Nick each a kiss on the forehead, and waves goodnight to both of them before moving to turn out the lights. She silently prays for no last minute objections, no tears or requests for lullabies, and when she gets out the door in silence she breathes a sigh of relief.

Steve stares at her when she arrives back in the living room, settled in on the couch with the remote in hand.

“How was your chat?”

“As good as can be.” She curls up beside him, tucking her feet under herself. “She’s coming here for the fourth.”

“Oh.”

“Please, contain your excitement.”

Steve laughs a little. “No, that’s good, that’s good. It’s about time.” MJ nods.

“And she’ll be staying in a hotel. So everyone wins.”

He squeezes her hand. “This will be good.”

“I hope so.”

She takes the remote from his hand and starts flicking, looking for anything even mildly interesting, as Steve watches her. He can see her jaw clenched just a little more tightly than usual, her fingers twitching ever so slightly.

“You nervous?”

“No.” 

“Once she’s here, and she meets her, she’s going to be on board. She’s going to love her.”

MJ speaks very quietly. “I wish I could be so sure.”

\--

She agonizes over whether she should bring the kids to the airport with her when she goes to pick her mom up. Does she want Frankie to first meet her grandmother in the airport arrivals section? Or does she want it to be at home?

Logic eventually wins—if she doesn’t bring the kids to the airport she’d have to arrange someone to look after them and it would just be too complicated. So on the morning of July 3rd, MJ has dressed Frankie in a little summer dress with a cherry pattern, and nice shoes, not sure exactly what she’s trying to prove by dressing her up but feeling some intense desire to do so. She gets both kids settled into the back of the car and heads off, Frankie singing along to “I Just Can’t Wait to be King” in gibberish, MJ intensely aware of the bubbling nerves in her stomach. She has explained to the best of her ability that today they’re going to see Nana, who is mommy’s mommy, just like Grandma is daddy’s mommy, but she doesn’t think Frankie really gets it. And she can’t blame her. MJ is just hoping above all that her mother gets it. 

She lets Nick toddle around the arrivals section a little as she watches the people pour through the glass doors, Frankie attached to her hip, quietly singing something unrecognizable. At least one of them is in a good mood. 

There she is. She trails a large rolling suitcase behind her, way too big for a three day stay, her eyes searching for MJ in the crowd until they land on her. She smiles slightly. MJ waves with her free hand.

“Nana?” Nick is tugging at MJ’s shirt, and MJ nods gently.

“Yep, there she is.” Carolyn wheels her bag to them, and MJ is a little glad to be spared from an awkward greeting hug because of the child in her arms. Instead, she gently prompts Frankie to give Carolyn a wave as she reaches them. “Can you say hi, Nana?”

Frankie suddenly is strangely shy. “Hi,” she mumbles, before looking back at MJ. 

“Hi, Mary Frances,” her mother replies. MJ can’t help but smile a little—she’d figured her mother would favour her full name over “Frankie.” Just like she’s never heard her mother call her “MJ” once in her entire life. As a kid, she’d hated being called Mary Jane, hated everything about the name, and especially hated that her mother downright refused to call her MJ like she preferred. But then she’d met Steve, and Steve loved her name, and suddenly being called Mary Jane was magical and special and loving. And now she’d given almost the same name to her daughter, and here they were all over again.

“Can I give her a present?” Carolyn asks, as Frankie buries her head against MJ’s chest, hiding. 

“Uh, sure, of course.” Frankie still doesn’t lift her head. “I’m not sure why she’s being so shy. She’s not normally.” 

Carolyn reaches into her oversized purse, and MJ nudges Frankie to look up. She does, hesitantly, and they both watch as a big stuffed Piglet emerges. Frankie’s eyes widen a little bit. 

“It’s Piglet!” MJ gushes as Frankie reaches out for the toy. “Can you say thank you to Nana?” 

Frankie makes a noise resembling the words, clutching Piglet tightly in her arm. “You’re very welcome,” Carolyn replies, and MJ can’t help but think how awkward it all is, how everything feels strange and off in some way she can’t place. But surely that’s normal. She tries to remember the first time Steve’s parents came over and saw Frankie, which, well, was two days after she came home with them, so everything was still a little strange, but she still thinks somehow it felt more normal than this. She pushes the thought aside. 

\--

They head back to MJ’s together, arriving in time for lunch for the kids. MJ leaves the three of them alone in the living room as she gets a meal ready, scrambling some eggs and steaming some veggies, all the while listening intently to everything going on in the other room. It’s suspiciously quiet, she notes to herself, but she resists the urge to poke her head out the kitchen door until the food is ready in two separate plastic dishes for the kids.  
When she does go to summon them for lunch, everything seems… normal enough. Carolyn is seated on the couch, watching both kids with a slight smile on her face as they both draw with crayons on paper. Nick’s is a little more intentional, while Frankie scribbles aimlessly, but MJ watches as Carolyn leans down and gently adjusts the paper so Frankie doesn’t draw on the floor. Frankie looks up at her, inquisitively, before returning to her drawing. MJ smiles.

“Lunch is ready.”

And to her great joy, she sees Carolyn bend down and scoop Frankie up. Frankie doesn’t protest, allowing herself to be carried to the kitchen as Nick follows them, and both kids are placed into their own high chairs. They eat together, the four of them, Carolyn trying to help both of them eat a little more cleanly, which is not an easy feat.

“Do you always feed them the exact same thing?” She asks at one point, not looking up.

“Yeah?”

“I see.”

MJ stares at her.

“Do you… think I shouldn’t?”

“Not necessarily.” Carolyn sighs a little as she speaks. “I mean, I never had two kids so close in age, of course. But if he’s always eating what she eats, don’t you think you’re slowing down his development a bit? He should be eating food for his own age level.”

MJ wipes a bit of smushed carrot that Frankie has somehow managed to get on her forehead. “I think it’s fine, mom.”

“Alright.”

Neither of them press further. They choose, instead, to maintain the peace. And after lunch, Carolyn reveals another present she’s brought, a pink blanket that looks hand-knit, and a blue one for Nick. 

“I didn’t know you knit,” MJ remarks.

“I don’t. My friend made them.”  
“Oh.” It’s still incredibly sweet, and MJ is starting to feel more and more reassured. This is working. Her mom is getting it, she’s accepting this as family, even if it’s not the concept of family she had before. This is good. 

They go to the park, Carolyn taking Nick’s stroller and MJ taking Frankie’s. It’s there that MJ feels the nerves finally dissipate, as she sits back on a bench and watches Carolyn play with the two kids on some big structure shaped like a train. They seem to be enjoying the time with her, and while a small part of MJ’s mind thinks back on the fact that her mother never played with her, or her siblings, when they were young, mostly she’s just grateful that she seems to be stepping up as a loving grandmother. Maybe it doesn’t matter that she was never the most loving mom. That’s the past, and this is now, and this is important to MJ. 

The day they spend together is lovely. MJ can’t stop smiling to herself. It’s nice to have the extra set of hands at home too, as MJ prepares a nice dinner for all of them—Steve, her mom, both kids and her. When Steve gets home, they eat all together, and he keeps giving her little knowing looks, his “I told you not to worry” looks. Frankie seems to have taken a liking to her grandmother, babbling at her specifically throughout the meal, and Carolyn seems happy to talk with her. 

Carolyn even stays as the kids get ready for bed, though Steve offered to drive her to her hotel earlier. She says she’ll wait, and watches from a distance as MJ gets both kids into bed and waits as they fall asleep. Carolyn has a hint of a smile on her face. It makes MJ’s stomach flutter. 

They made it through the day, and it was all smooth and perfect, and MJ practically breathes a sigh of relief as she and her mother head towards the car so she can drive her to the hotel. It’s only a few minutes away, and they sit in silence for the first little bit, before MJ eventually speaks up.

“Today was wonderful.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees her mother nod, and she waits for a response. Silence. So she speaks up again.

“Frankie really seemed to like you. You got along well. I was a little worried, she’s not always great with strangers, and I told you about how when we first brought her home she didn’t really like Steve for a whi-”

“Mary Jane.” The words are harsh, and suddenly MJ’s stomach drops, a wave of sickening anxiety passing through her. Somehow, she knows, she knows that this is bad, that whatever is about to be said is going to kill her. “She’s a wonderful girl, really, so precious and sweet.”

A beat. MJ swallows. “And?”

“And I’m just never going to be able to see her as your daughter.” 

MJ forces her vision not to cloud over with anger, reminding herself that she’s still driving and she needs to stay in control. “You… what?”

“I think what you are doing is great. It’s very generous of you to give her such an amazing home, and an amazing life-”

“That’s… not what I’m doing, mom. She’s my daughter.”

“I just can’t see it like that. I know you can, but… she’s not my family. I can be nice to her, and buy her presents, and play with her but I can’t… she doesn’t feel like family.”

MJ has no idea what to say, or think, or how to breathe anymore. 

“Can’t you just… try?” The words come out desperate, quiet, her voice cracking.

“I did.”

They’ve arrived at the hotel. Both women sit awkwardly in the car, a deafening silence reverberating between them. They’ve left it at a weird place, and something else has to be said before goodbye, but neither know what. Finally, Carolyn speaks again. 

“I’m sorry, Mary Jane, I truly am. She’s just… she doesn’t look like you, she doesn’t feel like she’s yours. I really wanted this to work.”

“Did you?”

“I did.” 

It’s so hard for MJ not to start crying. 

“I’m sorry,” Carolyn repeats, her voice now at a whisper. Today might be the first time she’s ever said those words to her daughter.

“Me too.”

And with that, Carolyn gets up from her seat. She heads to the trunk of the car, opening it and grabbing her suitcase.

“Goodnight, darling,” she calls through the open trunk. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” Somehow MJ doubts that.

“Goodbye,” she replies. The trunk slams shut. MJ doesn’t watch as Carolyn walks away, staring at the steering wheel instead, vision blurry with tears. She has no idea how long she sits there, trying to keep breathing, trying to keep the panic and the sadness and the hurt and the anger from shattering her into a million pieces.

Eventually, when the tears have slowed down enough for her to drive again, she takes off towards home.


	23. July 2003

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MJ's family is there for her when it all comes crashing down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last actual proper chapter of this story (!!!!!) and I actually cannot believe I made it this far, hahaha. There will be an epilogue as well. It is already written but I will wait a few days before posting it. :)
> 
> Thanks to anyone who actually read this all!

She cries so much on the drive home she almost pulls over. Her vision is blurry, and her heart rate feels fast enough to kill her, but she powers through until she finally pulls back into her driveway. 

She sits in the car for a moment, looking at the lights of the house through the windows. The nursery window, dark, while the living room is illuminated, no doubt where Steve is watching something on TV. She can’t stop staring at the dark nursery, until eventually it occurs to her that Steve can probably see the car in the driveway, and she has to go in. So she does. 

Steve greets her with a quiet “hi, hon,” without turning around to see her. Only when he receives no response does he turn to her in curiosity, and immediately he can tell something is horribly wrong, can see she’s been crying for the past twenty minutes. And she still is. He clicks the remote, and the TV screen goes dark. 

“Oh, sweetheart, what happened?”

She doesn’t answer, instead letting out a loud sob, maybe an attempt at some words that are completely unintelligible. She steps towards him, chest heaving, and he stands to take her in his arms. She all but collapses into him, the kind of display of emotion he does not see from her often, and so he knows how serious this is as he holds her tightly, her shoulders shaking. “Shhh, it’s okay, it’s okay,” he murmurs vaguely, though he still has no clue what’s going on. He can assume, however, that something was said. That, as is often the case when her mother is around, MJ got hurt. Badly.

“It’s not okay,” she whispers. He nods. 

“Come sit.” She does, curling up beside him on the couch, the room silent except for the ragged sound of her breathing. She leans into him, trying to calm herself a little. She needs to tell him what happened, but she can’t. She can’t repeat what was said, can’t even think about it, it just makes her stomach hurt too much. She’s pretty sure he’s waiting for her to offer up the information of her own accord, but when it doesn’t happen, he prods: “Did she say something to you?”

“Yeah.” MJ nods. She needs to figure out how to tell him, and she’s not really sure why she can’t. In some strange way, she doesn’t want to admit what her mother said, because she knows it’ll disgust him. She knows he’ll think it’s terrible, and for some absurd reason that bothers her, the idea that he’ll be disgusted with her mother. Like she wants to preserve the one ounce of respect he has for her. Like she doesn’t want Steve to know the truth, because he’ll hate her beyond the point of repair. And MJ doesn’t want that, doesn’t want him to hate her mother. Because she’s her mother. 

So instead she just cries, without words, burying her face in her husband’s chest and creating a damp spot in his shirt. She focuses on the feeling of his hand against her back, rubbing circles. 

“Can you tell me what she said?” He finally asks. Without looking up, she shakes her head slightly.

“I can’t.” Her words are choked. “Not right now.” 

“Okay.” He’ll have to know eventually. 

They lie there for a while, until MJ cries herself out, and her breathing eventually steadies. Then they go upstairs, get ready for bed in silence, climb under the sheets together. Only then, in the pitch dark and complete silence, where she doesn’t have to see his face, does she speak. 

“She said Frankie isn’t her family.” The words are met with silence. “She said it’s nice of us to give her our... charity. But she refuses to see her as my daughter.”

“Oh.” MJ feels Steve’s arms pull her into him, her body curling into his shape. 

“She said she tried, but she can’t. That to her she’s not my daughter.”

There’s a moment where Steve is clearly speechless. 

“I’m so sorry, Mary Jane.”

“About what.”

“About… everything.”

MJ sighs. 

“Yeah.”

In the silence, he kisses the back of her head, his arms still wrapped tightly around her.

“Your daughter loves you so much,” he whispers. “The love the two of you have for each other is… special. And I feel lucky to get to see it. To watch you two together.” He can hear that she’s crying once again. “It’s a shame she doesn’t see that.”

“I used to be so scared I wouldn’t be able to see her as my child.” She’s never said that out loud, never admitted it. “Or love her as much as Nick. But she’s everything to me, Steve, she’s everything and I’d die for her and those kids are my whole world and I just don’t get how she can’t see that.” 

“I know.”

She takes a moment to catch her breath. “I’ve put up with so much. So much. And I’ve spent so much time wondering if she really loves me. And now I know what it feels like to have kids, to love them, and I’m more sure than ever that she doesn’t. She doesn’t love us. Not really. Not like she should. I don’t think she can, don’t think she’s capable of it.” She’s trying not to become hysterical again, to hold on to her last thread of rationality. “I guess that’s not her fault. And you know what? I could live with that. I’d accepted that. But I can’t live with her not loving my daughter. I just can’t.”

His grip around her tightens. “You shouldn’t have to.”

She exhales, out of words.

“I’m tired,” she says simply. Tired of this day. Tired of being awake. Tired of a lifetime of just wanting to be loved.

“Let’s go to sleep.”

She takes a deep breath.

“Goodnight, Steve.”

“I love you so much, Mary Jane. So so much.”

“I love you too.”

“And you really are an amazing mother.”

She refuses to cry anymore.

“Thank you.”

\--

There’s the brief moment of peace in the morning when she first wakes up, as there always is when you wake up in the morning the day after something terrible happens. The fleeting minute where she hasn’t yet remembered how yesterday ended, before the memory hits her and the sadness settles right back onto her chest like a cinderblock. 

Frankie is crying. The sound registers somewhere in her mind, in some kind of fog. Steve is stirring beside her, and still she just lays there, staring up at the ceiling. She feels him slide to her side, and he presses his lips against her shoulder, firm, lingering. 

“Morning.” There’s a certain heaviness to the word. The morning greeting for a day that is certain to be extremely difficult.

“Morning,” she replies. She needs to go get Frankie, but her limbs feel heavy. Steve gets up instead, and she takes another minute to herself, catches her breath. But she has to get up. Her kids are waiting.

They sit in the kitchen, the four of them, Frankie and Nick with bowls of banana and strawberries for breakfast. Steve offers MJ to make her something nice, like pancakes, but she doesn’t think she could eat much. Instead she forces down some strawberries as she sips at her coffee. The caffeine probably isn’t going to help her nerves, but she drinks it anyways.

“Are you going to let her come over today? Or-”

“I don’t know.” She bites into a strawberry, before changing her answer. “No, I’m not going to let her over. But I need to… talk to her.” Steve nods. It occurs to her that it’s rather strange her mother hasn’t called yet. 

“What are you doing to say?”

“I have no idea.”

It’s just before 9 am when the phone finally rings, and her heart immediately starts beating at twice the speed. She wants to ignore it, but she forces her shaking hand to pick it up.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Mary Jane.” No “darling” this morning. The air is thick. 

“Hello.” She truly has no idea what to say to her mother right now, and she wants to scream. 

“Should I come over?”

“No.” She wonders if her anger is as obvious on the other end of the line. She becomes aware that Steve has stepped into the room, watching her. 

“No?”

“No, I don’t want you here.”

“Okay, well, I think we should talk.”

“Yes.” Steve takes a few steps towards her. “I’m going to come to your hotel, maybe we can… go for a drive, or something.”

“Oh? Alright. Will you come now?”

“I’ll come for…” She glances at her watch. “I’ll come for 11:30.” That gives her just over two hours to figure out what the fuck she’s going to say.

“Okay. See you soon, darling.” She flinches at the word. 

“See you soon.”

The click of the phone being hung up. Steve looks at her. 

“You’re going over there?”

“Yeah.”

She spends the next two hours pretending she isn’t on the verge of passing out. She puts together a little train track with the kids, she shows them how to run the trains all the way around, she cuddles with Frankie and the stuffed Piglet she got yesterday as her gift from Nana. Frankie sits in MJ’s lap, with Piglet wrapped up tight in her arm, and says that word: “Nana.” Over and over. MJ says nothing. 

And then it’s 11, and she tells them she has to go somewhere for a bit but she’ll be back soon. Frankie whines a little, wrapping her arms around MJ’s calf, and she wants to tell her she doesn’t want to leave either, would give anything to stay here. She wants to tell her daughter that she has to go _for_ her, she has to go because _she_ is the most important thing in the world to her. But instead she just scratches the top of her head, and says “Mommy will be back very, very soon.”

She still has no idea what the hell she wants to say, as she drives there. She’s so angry, a fury like she’s never really experienced. Or maybe she has. Normally, with her mother, she’s too busy feeling hurt, and upset, and raw to reach the point of anger. But it was one thing when it was just her on the receiving end of the cruelty. Her daughter is another story entirely. She’s not sure how she’s even going to look at her. That Beyoncé song that’s always on the radio is playing. She turns it up a bit, trying to pull it together. 

Suddenly she’s outside the hotel, unsure how she even got there. Her mother is standing at the front door, and she approaches the car as it pulls up, sliding into the passenger seat. 

“Do you want to drive somewhere?” Her mother asks. MJ puts the car into park.

“No.” She is completely, utterly at a loss for words. She doesn’t know what to say, because she doesn’t know what she feels, or why. She just knows she can’t do any of this anymore.

“Mary Jane, look, I was just being honest with you. I figured that’s what you would want. That you wouldn’t want me to lie.”

MJ does not look at her. She stares straight ahead, through the windshield.

“What I wanted was for you to… find room in your heart to love my children.”

Her mother says nothing in response.

“But you couldn’t.” The silence in the car is overpowering, deafening. “I have spent my entire life trying to convince myself that you loved me. Since I was a kid. I have had to tell myself over and over again that you _must_ love me, because you _have_ to, because you’re my mother. But I don’t know. I don’t know if you do.”

She waits for the response again, waits to see if she’ll tell her she’s wrong. She doesn’t. 

“And for you to _know_ , to understand what I’ve been through, what I went through to become a mom. To have those two kids. Because I wanted a family. I wanted to give my children the love I have spent my whole life trying to feel, I wanted what I never once felt growing up, and I went through hell to get it, and you _knew_. You knew I lost _three_ of them, and how much I was struggling, and then what I lost with Nick, and you knew about…” She stops. She won’t go into that. Not now. “You didn’t care. I kept hoping you did, that you’d ask if I was okay, but you never did, you just made jokes and looked at me like I was pathetic when I was falling apart. And then you come here, to my house, and you meet my daughter, and you tell me she’s not my child. That you can’t love her. One of the best things that has ever happened to me, and you tell me you can’t find room in your heart for your granddaughter. I don’t know what’s wrong with you.”

More silence. MJ sits with it a little longer this time, waiting for the reply. Nothing.

“I don’t think I want you in my life anymore.” She hadn’t processed the thought until she said it out loud, but she knows as she hears it that it’s the truth. She cannot live with this anymore. She can’t look past the hurt this time.

“Oh.”

“I can’t… I can’t do this anymore. If you can’t be a grandmother to Frankie then you can’t be in my life. I’m done.”

Carolyn doesn’t look over at her.

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

It’s the coldest chill she has ever felt from her mother, and that’s no small feat. She suddenly feels sick to her stomach, her hands trembling. She wills herself not to cry. 

“I’ll take you to the airport, if you want.”

“No, that’s okay. I can take myself.” A small voice in MJ’s head hopes maybe, just maybe, her mother will fight her, fight to stay in her life, or at the very least ask to say goodbye to Nick, or to her. But she doesn’t ask to say goodbye. She doesn’t ask if they can talk this over again soon. If they can have a second chance. She just moves to get up from her chair, and opens the car door. 

MJ watches as her mother slides out of the front seat. 

“Goodbye, Mary Jane.” The door slams as she closes it, forceful, the sound ringing in her ears, and she watches her mother walk away, standing tall. 

She cannot believe she did that.

She feels a little unhinged, a little impulsive, blinded by rage, but she also thinks this may be one of the most rational things she’s ever done. And above all the noise, her mind reminds her over and over: her mother didn’t fight back. She didn’t say “don’t do this,” or “I’m sorry,” or “I still want to be in your life.” Because MJ was right. She doesn’t care.

She disappears through the front door of her hotel, and MJ wonders, genuinely, if that was the last time she will ever see her mom. But there’s truly no way of knowing. And after another moment, she pulls out of the parking lot and heads home.

\--

She doesn’t drive straight home. Instead she gets on the highway, driving further and further from home, recklessly fast. She feels like she is buzzing, vibrating from deep inside, and she just needs to be in motion. 

She flashes back to that one weekend in college, the weekend after the Friday that was the worst night of her life, when she got into her car on a Sunday night and drove as fast as she could so she could just be anywhere but there. Five hours later she ended up at her grandmother’s, saying out loud for the first and last time that something had happened at a party, something awful, and now she didn’t know what to do. She imagines going there now, wishes she could, but she’s gone, and besides it wouldn’t matter. She’d driven those five hours trying to escape, but she couldn’t, because the thing she’s always trying to escape is inside her, buried deep. She can never get away from it, no matter how hard she keeps trying. The “thing.” She doesn’t even know what it is. Just whatever the hell is wrong with her.

And then she remembers Steve, as her car speeds down the highway. Steve is at home, waiting for her, to see how it went. He’s waiting to hold her, to tell her it’s okay. That’s where she needs to be right now. The tingling on her skin settles a little, replaced with an overwhelming desire to be back with her husband. She pulls off the highway at the next exit, and turns around, and heads home.

She drives at a more normal speed, and soon she’s pulling back into her driveway. She takes a quick glance at herself in the mirror. She looks, well, surprisingly fine. She hasn’t cried at all. She grabs her purse and heads back inside. 

Steve is seated on the couch, but he leaps up at the sound of keys in the door, rushing towards her in the doorway.

“Hi,” he says, quietly.

“The kids?”

“We had lunch and they’re both napping, got them down pretty easily.”

“Oh, great.”

“So…?”

She drops her purse on a table by the door, and kicks her shoes off, heading over to the couch. Steve follows her, settling in beside her facing her. 

“So?” He repeats. “What happened?”

She isn’t sure what to say, and suddenly the situation is starting to dizzy her. She has to say it out loud, that she kicked her mom out of her life, that she told her she’s done. Something squeezes at her heart, and suddenly she just wants to be held, to be touched more than anything in the world. So she leans forward, and places her hands on Steve’s cheeks, and kisses him.

He’s caught off guard, but relaxes into it after a second, kissing her back, and she moves her hands to his back, running them over him. He breaks away from her lips for a moment, mumbling something, and she sighs.

“Steve, can you just… I need…” She moves his hands to her chest, pressing herself into him, and after a moment she moves to shed her clothing, overwhelmed by the desire to feel him all over her, to just feel loved in the most visceral way she knows. And then she feels him pull back. 

“MJ, stop, you’re not… we need to talk, this isn’t a good idea.”

Oh. She drops her hands, disappointed, smoothing her shirt down. “Fine.”

He looks concerned now, his eyes squinting at her. “Are you okay?”

“Not really.”

They sit in silence for a moment, MJ curling her feet under her, leaning her head against Steve. His arms reach to wrap around her, holding her. What she needs.

“I told her I didn’t want her in my life anymore,” she finally whispers.

“Oh, holy shit.”

“Yeah.”

“And… what did she say?”

“Nothing.”

He looks confused. “What?”

“She just said ‘goodbye’ and slammed the car door and left.”

His grip on her tightens. “Oh.”

And then the tears come. She melts into him, surrendering herself to his arms as she begins to sob into him for the second time in two days. “Oh, sweetheart.” His hands rub her back, wishing he could do something, anything to make her feel better.

“I just… don’t understand why she can’t just… why she doesn’t…” He knows what she’s trying to say. She doesn’t understand why her mother can’t love her, and her family, the way she’s supposed to. 

“I know.” He’s been with MJ for eight years now, married to her for five, and he’s still learning how desperately she just wants to feel loved. All the time. And how terrified she is to admit it. Because when you grow up like she did, when the people who are supposed to love you unconditionally _don’t_ … it’s hard to believe anyone can. He’s never met anyone as fiercely independent as her, and yet he sees, time and time again, in her darkest moments, that more than anything she just wants someone to love her. 

He does. So, so much. He’s never sure if she realizes how much.

“I just wanted to have one normal fucking thing for once. For my fucking mom to love my children. That shouldn’t be a crazy thing to want.”

“It isn’t.”

She gasps for air, her cheek against his chest, tears staining his shirt. “I just… wanted to be a family.”

He nods, placing his hand on the back of her head, holding her against him. There’s nothing to say. His heart aches for her.

“I love you so, so much, Mary Jane,” he whispers. “More than I could ever express. You are the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

She lets out a choked sob, squeezing at his shirt.

“I just don’t understand.”

He hates this. He wishes he could do something, anything, for her. “You’re an _amazing_ mom, and wife, and person, and I don’t know what I did to deserve you, I really don’t.”

She takes a shaky breath, her emotions starting to dull a little once more.

“And I know it might not be exactly what you wanted, but you have a wonderful family here, we are a family now. The kind any kid would be lucky to have. Your kids love the shit out of you. And me. You’re stuck with me forever.”

She nods. He kisses the top of her head, gently. 

“Okay, now say more nice things about me,” she whispers, her eyes dark red, but voice a little less strained.

“You’re the funniest person I know, you’re compassionate, and kind, and devoted, and smart, and loving-”

“And pretty?” She pouts at him, and he chuckles.

“You’re fucking gorgeous.”

She sits up, kissing him once again. She still looks utterly broken. But for now, the pain in her chest has dulled to a low throb. “Thank you.”

“We’re going to be okay, MJ. It’s all going to be okay.”

They sit there, curled into each other on the couch for a few moments, before the sound of crying interrupts them. Frankie. She always wakes up crying, unlike Nick, who usually just sits there in silence until someone realizes he’s awake. Frankie’s crying is usually the signal that nap time is over. MJ and Steve pry themselves apart, standing and heading towards the nursery. 

It’s always nice to do things together, as parents. Normally, she handles naptime as a solo activity, so it’s a fourth of July treat to have Steve here with her. One parent for each kid. Frankie’s tears stop the minute she sees them enter the room, locking eyes with her mother, frown shifting to a hopeful grin. She holds her arms up, ready to be lifted out of her crib. 

MJ hoists her up and rests Frankie against her hip, watching as Steve picks Nick up and places him down onto the ground. He toddles out of the room, racing quickly down the hall. MJ smiles.

“Someone has a lot of energy,” she muses. “I think maybe we should go play outside.”

Frankie squeals in delight. They take the kids out back, Steve tossing down a big bag of toy buckets and shovels and various toys into the little sand box they had put in last month. She sits on the steps of their back porch, a few feet away from them, as Steve settles onto the ground with both kids. He shows them how to put the wet sand in the bucket and dump it out so it holds its shape. The concept is a little bit advanced for them, especially Frankie, and MJ giggles to herself as they turn over bucket after bucket of loose dry sand that quickly collapses. Steve looks back at her, grinning.

After a while he stands, and comes to join her on the steps. Nick seems to be getting the hang of it. They watch as he helps Frankie, ever so gently, trying to show her that the sand has to be dark, messily shovelling it into a bucket with her. So patient, wise beyond his years.

She leans her head against Steve’s shoulder, and reaches to take his hand.

“My hands are all sandy.”

She squeezes it anyways.

She can hear the kids babbling to each other, speaking some strange toddler language they always seem to understand. Frankie’s tone will be questioning, and Nick answers with confidence, gibberish symbols that Frankie nods understandingly at. MJ smiles so wide her cheeks start to hurt.

“We are very lucky people,” she whispers to Steve. He nods.

“We sure are.”

The joy starts to overpower the sadness once more. She has so much to be joyous about. She tries to think back to just a few years ago, the third time she saw the blood and knew she’d lost another pregnancy. How she truly thought, in that moment, that it would never happen for her, that she’d never get to have this, what she has now. The day she gave birth to Nick, the happiest moment of her life, and then tinged with the sadness of learning she’d never have another child. But then she did. She has two children. A family. All she’s ever wanted. 

There’s so much to be grateful for. So much lost, and so much gained. The pain of what ended today hangs over her head like a cloud. But as she watches her two children play together, she feels the cloud get a little lighter, a little less grey. Nothing’s ever perfect, she supposes. 

Maybe this is close enough.


	24. Epilogue (February 2020)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A reunion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cannot BELIEVE i actually finished this whole fic but here we are. this is my greatest accomplishment in life, i think.

It takes everything in her to not show her disappointment when Sarah doesn’t recognize her.

She shouldn’t have expected her to—she hasn’t seen her youngest niece since she was three, and she’s five now, with adorable curly hair and big brown eyes that look at MJ slightly questioningly as she crouches to her level to say hello. 

“Hi,” MJ smiles warmly, her voice a little higher than usual, light. “Do you remember me? It’s been a long time since I saw you!” 

Sarah looks at her, unsure, before shaking her head slightly. 

“That’s Auntie MJ,” Emily jumps in from behind her, proud and all-knowing. She’s seven now, MJ knows, so much taller than she was the last time MJ saw her. She used to talk to her on FaceTime when she was younger, before she gradually stopped talking to her family as much. Now she just talks to her sisters, but her nieces and nephews don’t know her that well, certainly not well enough to want to talk to her on the phone. She’ll have to change that.

Sarah whips around. “I know who she is.” MJ laughs. Well, that’s something. “She asked if I remembered her.”

It’s good to see them, even if it serves to remind her how long it’s been since she really saw her family. This part of her family. She wishes she had Nick and Frankie here with her. She’ll show lots of pictures of them to her sister later, sure, but it’s not quite the same. 

MJ has a lot of regrets—certainly more than the average person—but drifting away from her sisters when things got bad is one of her biggest ones.

Anyways. She tries not to linger on regrets. She’s here now, watching Sarah smile nervously at Uncle Steve before retreating into another room. Emily stays, giving MJ and Steve a welcoming grin as if she owns the place. “It’s been so long,” Emily says, like she’s forty. MJ holds back a laugh, squeezing Steve’s hand.

“It sure has.”

—

She wishes she could enjoy it all more. The coffee and breakfast Stephanie has made for her, the chance to catch up with her sister in person for the first time in a while, just the two of them, as Steve is off exploring the neighbourhood. They chat on the phone a lot now, and Steph even came to visit a few months back when she needed a little break from the kids. MJ has been putting effort into reconnecting with the people she cut off, and her sisters were top of that list. She loved both of them so, so much, and it hurts to know that her relationships with them were another casualty of her life going off the rails. But they understood. They knew what had happened. Or at least part of it. Now here she is, trying so hard to just enjoy a nice breakfast in Stephanie’s kitchen, the sound of kids bickering lightheartedly off in the distance. Stephanie’s home is so unlike the Healy house. It’s quaint and cozy and sweet, with mismatched decor. Homey. MJ tries to let it calm her.

Nothing can distract her from the fact that she is about to see her mother.

It’s been fifteen years. A long time to have absolutely no contact with your mom. And honestly, she’d thought she’d never see her again, had believed when she cut her off that the wounds were simply too deep to ever be repaired and she’d only know peace if she cut ties completely. She hasn’t necessarily changed her mind on that front, either. But she also can’t help but see things a little differently now. 

She thinks often about her relationship with her own daughter. She thinks about how her fear, and her secrecy, and her desperation to keep herself from crumbling had pushed her away. She thinks about all the pain she hid from Frankie, the deep-set fear that she convinced herself she had under control, but really was ruling every aspect of her life, including driving away her children. She wonders what would have happened if the pills and the hurt hadn’t finally brought her to her knees, if her life hadn’t come crashing down around her, if she were still keeping all those secrets and pushing Frankie away. At what point would her demons have won, have pushed her daughter too far, past the point of return? Around the time her mother had pushed her away for good? At the rate she was going, probably sooner. Now she’d worked things out with her daughter. She owes her mother that same chance.

And then she thinks she’s being too optimistic. On some level, she knows her mother never felt about her own children the way MJ feels about hers. Because even when things were immeasurably bad two years ago, she knew she loved her kids deeply and ferociously, more than she’d ever thought she could love anyone. She knew because she’d hold the small handfuls of pills in her palm and stare at them, knowing she could take just a few more and it would all stop, finally, stop forever, and she can’t pretend she didn’t entertain the notion, can’t pretend the thought of ending things wasn’t dangerously enticing at some points, but then there were her kids. In those moments, when she wanted silence and peace more than anything, she remembered her kids and she stayed for them. She needed to stay for them. Her mother never felt that way about her. Or at least, she doesn't think so.

But she knows she's not being fair. Because, while she so wishes she could say she'd never do anything to hurt her children, or her husband, she would be lying, because she has. She hurt all of them in turn, time and time again, deeply, sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose. And while she knows she loves them with everything in her, she has to remember that eventually there came a time when she held the pills in her hand, and knew she was taking too much, that she was in too deep and the world was slipping away, but she needed that peace and that silence so badly that she swallowed them down. That whole year, she acted without consideration for the three people who matter most to her, ignoring that she was destroying their world along with her own. She lives with that now. She lives with the regret of it all, has to learn to forgive herself. Maybe her mother does too.

MJ knows she is capable of love. She has always thought her mother isn’t. That hasn’t necessarily changed. But now she wonders what made her like that. If that’s how she was born, or if it happened to her somewhere along the way. 

“You’re nervous?” Steph asks, and she snaps out of the dark place. She must look broody, she realizes, so she smiles.

“God, yes.” 

“She’s not as… intense as she used to be.” 

MJ fidgets with a napkin.

“She was always worst with me, though,” she whispers.

Stephanie nods. “I know.”

MJ can’t eat anything anymore. Every passing minute brings them closer to her arrival. Steph had asked if she wanted her to stay, as a buffer, and as much as she wanted to say yes, please God yes, she also knows she needs to do this privately. 

And then before she knows it it’s 11:00, the time her mother is supposed to arrive. And then it’s 11:01, and then 11:02, and then there’s a knock at the door. 

“Grandma’s here,” Emily’s voice calls out from the other room, as if the two adult women are not intensely aware of who is at the door. MJ swallows her nerves, following her younger sister to the front door, her heart beating in her chest as she watches her open it.

Her mother looks old.

It’s the first thing she can think. She knows she turned 70 this year, and she was in her fifties that last time MJ saw her, so of course she looks much older, but it’s striking to see your mother as an old woman when that’s not how you remember her looking.

The kids are running up to greet her, and yet Carolyn’s eyes are frozen on her oldest daughter as she stands in the doorway.

“Hi, mom.” 

Carolyn blinks, some sadness in her face, some surprise. “Hi, Mary Jane.” MJ feels those words in her stomach, the unmistakeable sound of her mother’s voice calling her by her name, her full name, the one so few people use. 

They’re staring at each other, and Stephanie breaks the loud silence. “Mom, do you want some tea?”

“I’d love some.” The women begin to move to the kitchen, kids following behind. Stephanie pours tea for both her sister and her mother, awkwardly present, clearly nervous to leave them. MJ gives her a reassuring look, trying to show her she’s alright. 

“Okay,” Stephanie finally squeaks, “I’m going to take the girls to the park but I’ll be right around the corner if you guys…” She thinks. “…need anything.”

“Thanks, darling,” Carolyn replies, another word MJ feels viscerally. They hear Steph round up her daughters, ushering them out of the front door strangely quickly, probably confusing them. The door clicks, and suddenly quiet, complete silence in the house.

“How are your kids?” Her mother asks, a little quietly.

“They’re really, really great. Nick goes to Harvard, in political science. He’s a freshman. Still getting used to him being gone.” She takes a tiny breath before continuing on, briefly remembering their last ever fight, the one MJ could never forgive, the things her mother had said about Frankie. She can’t think about it for more than a second—it still makes her too angry, and if she fixates on that she’ll never be able to carry out a conversation. She has to hope maybe her mother sees how wrong she was. “And Frankie is 18. She’s a writer. Like I used to be. Except she writes poetry. She goes to Sarah Lawrence.”

“That’s wonderful.” A pause. “I always knew you’d be a great mother. I really hope I can meet both of them soon. I'm sure they are both amazing."

It's a clear olive branch, and MJ finds herself smiling a little. But it's not that simple. “Mom, there’s a lot I want to talk about with you. A lot of it is… hard. What do you know about the past few years?”

Carolyn shrugs a little. “Nothing.” MJ thinks she’s lying, thinks she knows everything and just wants to hear it straight from her mouth. Fair enough. 

“I, uh…” She has no clue where to even start. She needs to talk about college, she knows, but that’s so big, so maybe she starts with the more recent past. “Steph and Maggie may have told you this, I don’t know, but almost two years ago I… became addicted to prescription painkillers.” 

“Oh,” Carolyn says simply. MJ still can’t tell if this is news to her or not.

“I ended up having a very serious overdose, and then I spent some time in the hospital, and then in rehab, and now I’m, well, doing much better. Still dealing with some stuff. But doing better.”

Her mother nods. Her silence is loud, but considering MJ has no idea if she’ll understand, maybe it’s for the best that she’s not speaking yet.

“Alright, that’s one big dark thing done. Are you ready for more?” The corners of MJ’s mouth twitch as she speaks, but her mother looks unimpressed. 

“What else?” She asks. Strangely receptive.

“Part of why I became dependent on drugs is that I was having some issues. I’ve had some… difficult experiences in my life that affected me longterm, a little more than I thought.“

“I see.” MJ wonders if her mother understands she herself is probably one of those “difficult experiences”. 

“So all around, I’m a bit of a mess.” She is aware, on some level, that she’s making jokes to pass herself off as comfortable, when in reality saying these words to her mother is making her want to melt into her chair. She forces her breathing to stay calm. “I see two different therapists now. And I’m doing alright.”

“I’m glad,” is all Carolyn says. It confirms her suspicion a little—her mother probably does not approve of therapy. MJ decides to leave out any mention of anti-depressants. 

“This is all very hard for me to say, you know,” MJ admits. “And whatever shame you’re feeling right now, I promise it doesn’t compare to what I have felt about myself.” There’s a little more bite to her words than she intends. 

“I’m not ashamed.” Carolyn is choosing her words very carefully. “I’m certainly surprised.” 

“I know you know what happened when I was in college,” MJ says suddenly. Carolyn is taken aback.

“What are you talking about?”

That somehow hurts the most. The radio silence from her mother for weeks, months, years when it came to the topic of that one awful night, the incident MJ knew her mother was well aware of, was one of the most painful things she had ever experienced. In a time when she needed more than anything to be told that she was going to be okay, to be held by her mother and promised that she wasn’t to blame, she got nothing. Not a word of acknowledgement. And to hear her continue this denial now makes her stomach ache. She decides to give her the benefit of the doubt.

“Grandma told you about something that happened when I was in my first year of college. I told her, and I know she told you something. I want to know what she told you.”

“MJ, I don’t-“

“Mom, please,” she whispers, her voice coloured with a touch of desperation. “This is important to me.”

Carolyn seems a touch offended, clearly not wanting to discuss this, but MJ is quickly becoming upset, so she considers her words.

“Your grandmother told me that you went to her upset, because…” It’s obvious the words don’t sit properly in her mouth, that she is uncomfortable beyond belief. “Because you’d had an… intimate encounter with a boy and felt you’d been taken advantage of.”

MJ blinks. Well, that’s one way to put it.

“And you never thought to ask me about it?”

Carolyn sighs in irritation, and MJ steels herself. This is evidently not what her mother had expected for this conversation.

“No, I didn’t. I don’t know why your grandmother even thought I would want to know that.”

MJ’s eyes narrow. “What?”

“What you did at college parties was obviously out of my control, and I expected a certain degree of… that behaviour. I’m not naive. But what I don’t understand is why you would bring your family into it. Why you thought any of us had any place in your sexual encounters. So no, I didn’t care to discuss it with you.”

MJ feels a little as though the wind has been knocked out of her, and suddenly she doesn’t understand why she thought this was a good idea. She’s so selective with who she discusses this with, out of protection, making sure she only talks to those who she knows will be supportive. She has no interest in sharing her story with those she thinks might not believe her. And yet here she is, opening up decades old wounds, for what exactly? She considers shutting it down here, talking instead about book clubs and gardening and pretending she never brought it up. But she knows, deep down, she wants to be heard, wants to make her mother listen. Even if it’s twenty years too late. 

She is unable to hide her anger, and from somewhere deep within her she finds herself looking her mother dead in the eyes, determined to stand her ground in a way she wouldn’t have when she was younger.

“That boy raped me.”

The air in the kitchen is thick with tension.

“I was scared out of my mind, I couldn’t even move, and he didn’t care that I was crying, and you’d know that if you’d cared enough to ask. But you didn’t.” 

“Mary Jane, I-“

“No, listen to me. What he did destroyed me. I spent that whole year wishing I was dead. And I needed you more than anything. I knew you knew, and I waited and waited for you to say something, anything, to tell me it wasn’t my fault. I needed someone to tell me that, I needed someone to help me. But you didn’t. And when I realized that you blamed me too…” She keeps the tears at bay. “You have no idea what that did to me.”

Her mother is staring at her, and she can’t quite parse what the look on her face means. A part of her wants to keep going, to tell her the most disgusting details, the things she’s only ever said out loud once, to Steve, not even to her therapist. Maybe if she can get across how horrific it truly was, she’ll finally understand. But she stops herself. She doesn’t have a right to know those parts. It’s not worth it. 

“Is there anything else?” Carolyn asks. MJ shakes her head gently. “Mary Jane, I don’t know why you expected me to know all that, to comfort you, without you telling me. Of course your grandmother didn’t say any of that. Yes, I might have done things differently if I’d known. There are… many things I’d do differently.” 

“Me too.” It might be as close to an apology as she's going to get. She takes it.

It occurs to her that her mother is remarkably calm. She can’t imagine how sick, how hysterical she’d feel if Frankie were telling her this, and yet her mother sits here, slowly sipping her tea, face emotionless. 

But it’s a defence mechanism she can relate to. A small part of her softens. She wants to ask her mother more, to ask how she felt when she first heard, how she feels now. If it stirs anything in her, the way it did for MJ, when she first heard about Bella. She wants to ask her mother if anyone ever told her, even once, that she was worthy of respect, that no one had a right to her body. Because MJ knows damn well no one had told her that, that when her agency was taken from her, when her dignity and her body were violated she accepted that as a fact of life, as her load to bear. That when her daughter came to her hurting because it had happened to her friend, she ignored it. Just like she'd been ignored. She has made every mistake she promised she wouldn't. She can't help but wonder if her mother made them for any of the same reasons.

“We can’t exactly change the past, Mary Jane,” Carolyn whispers. “We can only move on.”

Maybe answers will just hurt her more. Herself and her mother. Maybe it doesn’t need to be said aloud, because they both know what they’ve lived through, what they’ve survived, and now MJ has a therapist and a husband who know, and that’s enough. Her mother is right. She’s gotten enough of the darkness into the open, she’s been heard, and now they need to learn to move on.

“I want to,” MJ agrees. She knows they have very different definitions of what moving on means.

MJ takes a sip of tea.

“Alright, I bared my soul. Anything you need to get off your chest?” She tries to sound lighthearted while still making it a genuine question. Her last chance.

“No.”

Simple enough. 

“So then tell me what you’ve been up to, lately,” MJ pushes. 

So she does. Carolyn tells her about her weekly playdates with the grandchildren, about how Richard is planning on moving closer to home soon (the one sibling MJ hasn’t caught up with as much, she thinks to herself, but always Carolyn’s favourite), about the cat she adopted recently. MJ tells her more about the kids, about Steve’s work, about the trip they took to the beach this summer. It’s their best attempt at normalcy, and it’s almost convincing. Or maybe it’s the most authentic part of their conversation today, because it’s about their lives now, and not their pasts—the lives they built for themselves in spite of whatever they went through. For MJ, a life she’s proud of beyond words, and her greatest reminder that she is far more than her trauma. She wonders if her mother can say the same. 

Stephanie gives them exactly an hour before she comes bustling through the front door, and MJ is glad to see her. The kids are excited to see grandma once more, and they lead her off into another room to show her something they made. It’s strange to see. Those could have been her kids, MJ thinks. They could have had that relationship with her too, but instead they don’t know her. She used to think that was for the best, but now she’s not sure. Everything’s so fucking hard.

She stays a little while longer, sitting on the couch and making conversation with the young girls as they play with grandma. At one point, her mother looks up and gives her a smile, and she feels her heart skip a beat. Even after all these years, the thought of making her mom smile still gives her this warm feeling inside. And seeing her play with her grandkids is special. 

She’s not sure exactly what she wanted from this encounter, so it’s impossible to know if she got what she came for. What she does know is something’s changed. She just has yet to pinpoint what exactly that is.

Finally, after discreetly sending a text to Steve, he arrives with the rental car to pick her up. He shakes hands with his mother-in-law, who gives him a look of something like approval, and then MJ says her goodbyes. A long hug with her sister, even though they have dinner plans for later that day. Big smiles to her nieces, who have already warmed up to their aunt—MJ has always been great with kids. And then she smiles at her mother, who smiles back, and they nod.

“Let’s have lunch before I go home,” MJ offers.

“That sounds lovely.”

And then they’re gone.

—

Neither MJ nor Steve say a word until they’ve both sat down in the car and closed the doors.

“Well, that seemed friendly back there,” he remarks.

“It was.” But now she’s removed from it, and everything hits her. She told her mom. Two decades later, she’d forced her mom to listen to her, to hear what that boy had done to her, what they’d all swept under the rug. Her mother knows she’s an addict now. Recovering, she corrects herself in her mind. Still. She hopes this was the right thing to do. She thinks it was.

She feels the tears well up in her eyes, no idea if she’s happy or sad. Steve hears her whimper, and he reaches for her hand, squeezing it as tight as he can. He’d hold her if it wasn’t so awkward in the car.

“Did you tell her? About college?”

MJ nods, wiping her cheeks. “About college, and about last year.”

“It’s a lot,” he assures her. “How did she take it?”

“I don’t know.” She takes a shaky breath. “She listened, though.”

“That’s something.”

“It is.”

So why can’t she stop crying?

Steve rubs her hand with his thumb.

“It’s so fucking hard to talk about with her.” She’s working her thoughts out aloud, trying to make everything make sense. “I could never… explain how bad she made me feel. For so long. I don’t think anything can take that back.”

“I know.”

He leans forward and kisses her forehead, placing his hand on the back of her head, playing with her hair. 

“But she listened.” She nods, to herself, emphasizing the point. “That’s what I wanted. Even if it doesn’t change anything.”

“I’m really proud of you,” Steve whispers. “I’m proud of you for doing that.”

Normally MJ would argue, but her mouth twitches into a smile. “I’m proud of myself too.”

“Do you think she’ll meet the kids?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” She looks down, thinking, and he kisses the top of her head gently. “She said she wants to. She said she wants to meet Frankie. I want her to, too.” She’s stopped crying, now, and he tilts her chin up and looks at her.

“You’re a really good person, MJ.” 

“She’s my mom.”

Steve nods. “And you gave her a second chance. You put yourself through that to try and understand. You try to see the good in people.”

MJ ponders this, not sure if she agrees. “I don’t know if I do. I think I just… see everything differently now. Now that Frankie and I…”

She doesn’t finish the thought, but he knows what she means. 

“That’s true too. But I still think you’re just a good person.”

She won’t argue with it. She doesn’t feel like a good person, but she’s learning to accept what Steve thinks about her might sometimes be right. 

It wasn’t perfect, but it couldn’t have been. There is no perfect in this situation, there’s no making things right. If there’s one thing she’s learned, it’s that she can’t take back the past, but she can learn to live with it. She can’t take back what happened to her at that stupid, she can’t take back the extra pills she took that quickly led to more, she can’t take back the things her mother said to her when she was young that still echo in her head every once in a while when she feels especially worthless. But she can learn to move forward. Like her mother said, today. They can’t go back and change it. They can only move forward.

They sit there for a bit, calm, in silence, before he eventually pulls away. She watches the house grow farther and farther away. It feels strangely symbolic, knowing her mother is inside, probably playing with the grandchildren who love her, who see her as good and kind and caring. She’ll see her again soon, she’s sure, and yet she still feels like she’s leaving something behind. Maybe the past. Or the secrecy. She’s put her heart on the table, and her mother heard her. Even if she didn’t share everything, the secrecy doesn’t have to bubble under the surface, tainting everything. She can move on.

The house fades into the distance.

It’s time to move on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to anyone who actually read all this and like if you did please comment i want to know if anyone actually made it to the end. thank you!!!!!


End file.
